MaramaAIC: tool support for consistency management and validation of requirements

Abstract

Requirements captured by requirements engineers (REs) are commonly inconsistent with their client’s intended requirements and are often error prone. There is limited tool support providing end-to-end support between the REs and their client for the validation and improvement of these requirements. We have developed an automated tool called MaramaAIC (Automated Inconsistency Checker) to address these problems. MaramaAIC provides automated requirements traceability and visual support to identify and highlight inconsistency, incorrectness and incompleteness in captured requirements. MaramaAIC provides an end-to-end rapid prototyping approach together with a patterns library that helps to capture requirements and check the consistency of requirements that have been expressed in textual natural language requirements and then extracted to semi-formal abstract interactions, essential use cases (EUCs) and user interface prototype models. It helps engineers to validate the correctness and completeness of the EUCs modelled requirements by comparing them to “best-practice” templates and generates an abstract prototype in the form of essential user interface prototype models and concrete User Interface views in the form of HTML. We describe its design and implementation together with results of evaluating our tool’s efficacy and performance, and user perception of the tool’s usability and its strengths and weaknesses via a substantial usability study. We also present a qualitative study on the effectiveness of the tool’s end-to-end rapid prototyping approach in improving dialogue between the RE and the client as well as improving the quality of the requirements. Show more