Inside Requirements

Requirements are on of the cornerstones of modern SW and System development. The following article shows you how to maintain and integrate Requirments in EA.

The great advantage of EA is the easy integration of Requirements with:

• UML / SysML
• Test / Verification
• Information linking
• Metrics and Charts

The big advantage of classical Requirements is that they are as easy as a spreadsheet. They consists of soly text and it's easy to tally them, to check if they are realized and tested. The downsize is that you might get messed up in a lot of textual requirments.

The thing against it is to mix Requirements with UML / SysML models. The hard facts of requirements with the understandability and consistence of UML / SysML models.

Example

Scenarios

I've come across the two scenarios:

1. All in EA (small up to middle sized projects)

• Requiremnts in a Requirement tool and integrate them in EA

Create Requirements

In scenario 2 you import / maintain the requirements from a specialized tool. The benefit of EA is to show textual Requirements together with models. After reading thousands of requirements you understand the power of consistent graphical information with hopefully some annotations.

Views

If you want to handle complex projects you want to see the requirements from different viewpoints. EA has a bunch of possibilities to accomplish that.

Metrics

Table Views

Matrix Views

Grafhical Views

Create Requirements

It's a good idea to have Auto-Naming Requirements. EA supports Auto-Naming Requirements out of the box. If you want more advanced features have a look at hoTools.

Graphical

Use graphical notations like the EA Requirement diagram to depict:

• dependencies
• realizations
• verifications

Specification Editor

Use the EA Specification Editor to create and maintain your requirements in a Spreadsheet like form.

Of course, you may combine these methods according to the circumstances at hand.

References

• Settings General