State-of-the-art: Automated quality assurance within Requirements Engineering

A well-implemented requirements engineering process results in better and more efficient systems, but the process of managing requirements is nontrivial and calls for several different competencies/skills. There are several different approaches and methods for requirements engineering, but also tools that automate parts of the process. The process of requirements engineering can be divided into several activities. This study focuses on the activities elicitation, specification, validation and management of requirements. This report builds on a literature review of academic articles with the aim of investigating if there are any tools for automated quality assurance. The tools have later on been compared to existing commercial tools, to analyze if they support the same activities in the requirements engineering process. The study identified 34 tools from the academic literature and compared them to 15 commercial tools. The tools were studied and compared concerning the level of automation and what activities they supported. The study shows that the tools described in the academic literature focused on specification of requirements and was at a conceptual level or prototype level, whereas the commercial tools had more functionality and focused on validation and management of requirements. The conclusion is that the tools described in the academic literature focus on specification and that commercial tools are database solutions that mainly support requirements management and traceability. Automated tools for requirements engineering is highly focused on implementation rather than on quality assurance.