Proposal for Eclipse-based Requirement Modeling Framework Released

Posted by Michael Stal on Jul 15, 2011

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Recently, a proposal for the Requirements Modeling Framework (RMF) has been officially released by eclipse.org. Vision is

to have at least one clean-room implementation of the OMG ReqIF standard in form of an EMF model and some rudimentary tooling to edit these models.

One of the essential prerequisites of software engineering is to start with a good requirements specification. Or as Cem Kaner once said, “a program which perfectly meets a lousy specification is a lousy program”. However, to obtain good requirements, requires several activities such as requirements engineering or change management. As different roles are responsible for requirements engineering and development, the requirement specification often resides in different tools than the development artifacts. Consequently, there are several media breaks and tools involved.

Idea of the Eclipse RMF is to provide a core for requirement tools so that they can integrate into the open source Eclipse environment. According to eclipse.org this

would offer a possibility for many projects that are involved in requirements management to find a common implementation of the standard. It would push Eclipse in to phases of the development process where it is currently under-represented.

As already mentioned, the RMF relies on OMG’s ReqIF (Object Management Group Requirements Interchange Format). This specification tries to introduce a common model and data exchange format for requirement specifications based on XML.

Initial contributions will be provided by itemis and the University of Düsseldorf. itemis will implement the EMF-based (Eclipse Modeling Framework) ReqIF Core, while the University of Düsseldorf offers a front end for working with ReqIF data. Further but optional parts comprise a Traceability GUI as well as a Traceability Framework.

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