Flexible modeling tools for pre-requirements analysis: conceptual architecture and research challenges

  • Authors:

  • Harold Ossher;Rachel Bellamy;Ian Simmonds;David Amid;Ateret Anaby-Tavor;Matthew Callery;Michael Desmond;Jacqueline de Vries;Amit Fisher;Sophia Krasikov

  • Affiliations:

  • IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA;IBM Haifa Research Center, Haifa, Israel;IBM Haifa Research Center, Haifa, Israel;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA;IBM Haifa Research Center, Haifa, Israel;IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Hawthorne, NY, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the ACM international conference on Object oriented programming systems languages and applications
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

A serious tool gap exists at the start of the software lifecy-cle, before requirements formulation. Pre-requirements analysts gather information, organize it to gain insight, en-vision possible futures, and present insights and recom-mendations 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 constrain-ing 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.