Abstract
Rigorous competition and tight time-to-market and quality requirements of
products are nowadays driving companies to develop products in collaboration.
Collaborative development also comes with challenges; communication between
parties and product and workflow management during the development
becomes more difficult. Especially, requirements management is seen as one of
the most critical activities during the development process. In practice,
requirements management means the identification of requirements and
managing the requirements change. Change management includes
requirements traceability between other requirements and between
requirements and other artefacts, such as design and source code items and test
cases. With the help of traceability, it is possible to see how certain requirement
change impacts on the product features and on whole development process.
One possible solution to help the requirements management on collaborative
development is the utilization of requirements management tools. In this thesis,
it is studied what needs and requirements software industry has for
requirements management tools and what kind of software tools are available
on the market and how they can support requirements management in
collaboration. This study started by analysing and evaluating requirements
management tools and their strengths and weaknesses against the collaborationbased criteria. Based on this evaluation, one of the tools (IBM Rational RequisitePro) was chosen for a tryout in a case study, where it was analysed against the criteria with a fictional scenario. In collaborative software
development, it is important that different tool vendor’s tools can work together
and, for example, traceability links between different product artefacts can be
shaped. For that reason, RequisitePro and Telelogic Synergy CM tools are
integrated between themselves using the Eclipse Framework as a base of
integration. This integration demands the development of an extension plug-in
between RequisitePro and Eclipse in order that these tools compose a working
solution for RM tool support in collaboration. Based on the case study, we gained clear improvement proposals especially for a plug-in, so that it is easier to continue developing it. The case study also gave experiences and additional information about constructing a collaborative software development environment and thus, helping the development of the tool chain infrastructure. It can be said that processes, practices and agreements are drivers for inter-company collaboration and the role of the tools is to provide discipline for the practices and processes as well as contribute activities for more effective collaboration.
products are nowadays driving companies to develop products in collaboration.
Collaborative development also comes with challenges; communication between
parties and product and workflow management during the development
becomes more difficult. Especially, requirements management is seen as one of
the most critical activities during the development process. In practice,
requirements management means the identification of requirements and
managing the requirements change. Change management includes
requirements traceability between other requirements and between
requirements and other artefacts, such as design and source code items and test
cases. With the help of traceability, it is possible to see how certain requirement
change impacts on the product features and on whole development process.
One possible solution to help the requirements management on collaborative
development is the utilization of requirements management tools. In this thesis,
it is studied what needs and requirements software industry has for
requirements management tools and what kind of software tools are available
on the market and how they can support requirements management in
collaboration. This study started by analysing and evaluating requirements
management tools and their strengths and weaknesses against the collaborationbased criteria. Based on this evaluation, one of the tools (IBM Rational RequisitePro) was chosen for a tryout in a case study, where it was analysed against the criteria with a fictional scenario. In collaborative software
development, it is important that different tool vendor’s tools can work together
and, for example, traceability links between different product artefacts can be
shaped. For that reason, RequisitePro and Telelogic Synergy CM tools are
integrated between themselves using the Eclipse Framework as a base of
integration. This integration demands the development of an extension plug-in
between RequisitePro and Eclipse in order that these tools compose a working
solution for RM tool support in collaboration. Based on the case study, we gained clear improvement proposals especially for a plug-in, so that it is easier to continue developing it. The case study also gave experiences and additional information about constructing a collaborative software development environment and thus, helping the development of the tool chain infrastructure. It can be said that processes, practices and agreements are drivers for inter-company collaboration and the role of the tools is to provide discipline for the practices and processes as well as contribute activities for more effective collaboration.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Qualification | Master Degree |
| Awarding Institution |
|
| Place of Publication | Oulu |
| Publisher | |
| Publication status | Published - 2006 |
| MoE publication type | G2 Master's thesis, polytechnic Master's thesis |