Improving the Requirements Engineering Process for an Electronic Clearinghouse

We present experience with improving the requirements engineering process for a telecommunications electronic clearinghouse that connects multiple trading partners. Software failures and faults were traced back to problems in the semi-structured requirements, which were written as message specifications (called "business rules") in a nonstandardized format using MS Word. To remedy these problems, we first designed a highly structured representation of the essential information in eXtensible Markup Language (XML), supported by XML Schema for precisely defining the requirements structure. Second, we developed XLEdit-a custom GUI for editing the XML documents in a friendly way while preserving their information structure. Third, to assist the requirements engineers with automated migration of the existing business rules, we developed a converter for translating from MS Word to the target XML format. The investment in the technology for structured requirements editing and valida...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: RE
• Authors: Mariusz A. Fecko, Christopher M. Lott
• Keywords: Business Rules, MS Word, RE 2002, Requirements, Software Engineering