| A Requirements plugin...anybody interested? [message #594428] |
Wed, 02 July 2003 12:33 |
Eclipse User |
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Originally posted by: steve.bannerman.comlab.ox.ac.uk
All,
Reqs
--
I'm currently working on a doctorate in software engineering. I recently
started an open source project to provide: (1) a generic requirements markup
language (RML); and (2) tool sets to browse/transform a set of requirements
files. The name of the project is "Reqs."
At a high level, it proposes embodying requirements in an analogous manner
to embodying source code: individual requirements in .rml files just like
individual Java classes in .java files (I know, except for inner classes
:-)). This avoids the "monolithic" requirements documents that we all love
to hate. Then, we can use the same configuration management tools that we
use in managing source code for requirements. You can check out the open
source project at: http://reqs.comlab.ox.ac.uk:8080/reqs
Requirement Browsing Perspective
--
Anyhow, the reason that I'm writing this newsgroup is that one of the
planned extensions to the core is an Eclipse extension. What I envision is
us, as Eclipse users, being able to load a set of requirements files into
our Eclipse workspace, browse them, sort them, filter them, and sometimes
even change them (if they're wrong or if we want to indicate that we've
implemented the code and the automated tests to support them, for example).
So talking in Eclipse terminology, I expect a Requirements Browsing
perspective (since the requirements files are organized within packages that
exist within folders). At the web site there is a Swing application that
you can download (under products) and from there you can probably use your
imagination as to how it might look within Eclipse.
Potential Benefits
--
Not only would this provide a tool of general applicability to all Eclipse
users, it might even provide some benefit to some or all of the Eclipse
projects or subprojects. If they don't already have a mechanism for
allocating requirements to releases (or Sprints in Scrum), rather than just
relying on a defect tracking tool, it could help.
It could provide a way for the team to place their requirements into a
repository and under version control as well as decide what attributes (if
any) they want to attach to their requirements (for example: what is the
priority of this requirement and how long do we think it will take to
implement). The core toolset is pretty configurable in this sense.
However, there may all ready be similar tools available that I'm not aware
of...if so, my apologies. I looked a little at "Koi" but it seemed to be
targeting real-time collaboration...this is not. Rather, it is just meant
to be a way to communicate requirements over the most ubiquitous computing
resource we have: the file system, and in a non-real time manner.
So, if anybody (or the project committee) is interested in such a
project/subproject, that's great. I'm willing to host the code at the web
site mentioned earlier. Alternatively, we could host the project here and
link to it from the other web site.
Interested to hear the community's thoughts...
Cheers
--
Steve Bannerman
steve.bannerman@comlab.ox.ac.uk
44.(0)1865.273866
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