An evaluation of software requirements tools

Abstract

Software requirements gathering from users, customers, and stakeholders is the very first and critical step in software development. Requirements are volatile due to change in needs, processes and technology. This makes manual requirement management a challenging task. To overcome such problems, practitioners developed various tools to collect and manage software requirements. Use of these tools can safe efforts and time and remove inconsistencies. In this study, we evaluated different tools which are used to manage and gather requirements during the whole life-cycle of software development or in a particular phase, which includes requirements elicitation, analysis, specification, verification, traceability, document support, graphical representation, and tool integration. Tools are analyzed according to functionality, scope, performance and availability.