Flexible Modeling Tools for Pre-Requirements Analysis: Conceptual Architecture and Research Challenges

A serious tool gap exists at the start of the software lifecycle, before requirements formulation. Pre-requirements analysts gather information, organize it to gain insight, envision possible futures, and present insights and recommendations to stakeholders. They typically use office tools, which give great freedom, but no help with consistency management, change propagation, or information migration to downstream tools. Despite these downsides, office tools are still favored over modeling tools, which are constraining and difficult to use. We introduce the notion of flexible modeling tools, which blend the advantages of office and modeling tools. We propose a conceptual architecture for such tools, and outline research challenges to be met in realizing them. We briefly describe the Business Insight Toolkit, a prototype tool embodying this architecture.