AGGREGATED PROCESS FOR EVALUATING REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING TOOLS

RE-tools (requirements engineering tools) are software tools that can help engineering and managing system and software requirements. However, the industry is not much aware of the usefulness of these tools. A part of the problem is the difficulty of evaluating and acquiring these tools to an organisation. There exists a number of attempts towards assessment of the RE-tools by applying general tool (a.k.a., commercial off-the-shelf, COTS) selection or specific RE-tool selection approaches and frameworks. However, the question still remains: what the techniques, methods and tools are available to receive a complete, self-contained and convincing RE-tool evaluation and to guide RE-tool acquisition to the organisation's needs. In this paper we present an aggregated RE-tool evaluation process (aR-TEP). Based on the results of a systematic review of the COTS and/or RE-tool selection approaches and frameworks we develop an eight-phase reference model, which aggregates best practices of the COTS and/or RE-tool evaluation into the single process. We partially validate our proposal through theoretical analysis of the reported tool evaluation experiments and case studies. We believe that the aR-TEP reference model can guide developers to select proper RE-tools and improve the RE process.