An automated collaborative requirements engineering tool for better validation of requirements

This demo introduces an automated collaborative requirements engineering tool, called TestMEReq, which is used to promote effective communication and collaboration between client-stakeholders and requirements engineers for better requirements validation. Our tool is augmented with real time communication and collaboration support to allow multiple stakeholders to collaboratively validate the same set of requirements. We have conducted a user study focusing on validating requirements using TestMEReq with a few groups of requirements engineers and client stakeholders. The study shows that our automated tool support is able to assist requirements engineers to effectively communicate with client-stakeholders to better validate the requirements virtually in real time. (Demo video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sWLOx-N4Jo).

1. Introduction

Communication and collaboration between requirements engineer and client-stakeholders is one of the most important activities in requirements engineering process [1]. As the initial stage of any software development, it is the key component to achieve success in a software development project [2]. Any errors found at the requirements stage will disrupt the completion of a project and cause many other problems. At this initial stage, a lot of key information and requirements about a project are reported and documented from the client-stakeholders. Therefore, it is very important to validate, verify and clarify the information so that common understanding of and agreements on the requirements can be achieved at the early stage of the development stage.