INSCO REQUISITE
A Web-Based RM-Tool to support Hybrid Software Development
F. J. Orellana, J. Cañadas, I. M. Del Águila and S. Túnez
Department of Computer Science, University of Almería
Ctra. Sacramento s/n, 04120, Almería, Spain
Keywords: Requirements Management, RM Tools, Hybrid Software, Knowledge Engineering.
Abstract: This paper presents InSCo Requisite, a Web-based Requirements Management Tool (RM-tool) supporting
InSCo, a methodology based on CommonKADS and RUP, for developing software systems in which
information systems coexist with knowledge-based components. A revision of similar requirement
management tools is presented, as well as a review of the main requirements proposed for this kind of tools.
1 INTRODUCTION
In many cases the complexity of the domains entails
software to provide solutions to problems related to
decision support process, transaction processing and
information management. This situation forces
development process to apply both Software
Engineering (SE) and Knowledge Engineering (KE)
methodological approaches.
In this context, Hybrid Systems (Kendal, 2001)
are software systems formed by several components
or subsystems, some of which perform knowledge
intensive tasks related to the decision support
process, and others performing tasks related to
transactions processing and information
management in databases. The former are
knowledge-based components and the latter are non-
knowledge-based components.
The application of existing methodologies
developing hybrid software presents some problems
that make the intertwining between SE and KE
necessary, in order to obtain the best result and a
successful final product (Acuña, 1999).
The InSCo methodology (Águila, 2006) emerges
as a solution for specific problems in hybrid systems
software development, specifying in an integrated
method, the process, activities, languages and tools
used for this type of systems, based on
CommonKADS (Schreiber, 1999) and RUP
(Jacobson, 2000).
Requirements elicitation is a basic InSCo
activity. The management of a large amount of
information and requirements is a critical task in
Requirements Engineering (RE) process
(Leffingwell, 2000). This work presents InSCo
Requisite, a web-based tool which supports
requirements management in the development of
hybrid software systems.
InSCo Requisite is available at the following
URL: http://www.dkse.ual.es/insco/ . This tool is the
final product which evolved from a prototype
version described by Orellana (2005).
The rest of this work is structured as follows:
section 2 explains the reasons that led us to build a
Web-based tool and the alternatives that were
considered. Section 3 reviews common requirements
for RM tools focusing on those that were applied to
InSCo Requisite, and the architecture applied in the
design. Then, section 4 describes an overview of
usage. Finally, the main conclusions and future work
are summarized.
2 RELATED WORKS
The success of the RE process depends mainly on
the collaborative work performed by the different
members, since a good participation will result in a
well defined system (Sinha, 2006) (Lang, 2001). For
this reason, any tool supporting the RE process for
the InSCo methodology should guarantee a direct
collaboration among the stakeholders involved in a
project.
Hybrid software projects usually need the
contribution of experts in a specific domain
(agriculture, medicine, architecture, etc) that do not
326
J. Orellana F., Cañadas J., M. Del Águila I. and Túnez S. (2008).
INSCO REQUISITE - A Web-Based RM-Tool to support Hybrid Software Development.
In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 326-329
DOI: 10.5220/0001712203260329
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

belong to the development team. If experts cannot
properly participate on the projects, the cooperative
work and consequently, the project progress could
be affected. Therefore, stand-alone tools were not
suitable for our purpose.
A Web-based application solves this problem. It
provides an easier access to the tool avoiding the
need to install a software client, and ensuring that
every stakeholder is able to participate actively in a
project from anywhere at anytime by means of an
Internet connection and a browser.
DOORS®/Net, Rational Requisite® Web and
IRqA®-Net are three of the most complete web-
based tools for requirement management. They are
mostly considered as a complement of their
corresponding stand-alone versions for some
eventual situations where a stakeholder has to work
from a remote place. Other web-based tools were
also considered as an alternative to carry out the RM
process of the InSCo methodology. However, they
were designed to deal with traditional software,
without regard to any aspect related to the
knowledge-based components presented in a hybrid
software system.
These reasons led us to build a specific web-
based tool to reach our goals. InSCo Requisite deals
with the characteristic aspects related to the
development of hybrid software following the steps
and activities defined by the InSCo methodology.
3 DESIGN APPROACH
Requirements needed for every RM-tool can mainly
vary depending on the organization and project
scope or the development team process maturity.
Hoffmann (2004) proposes a wide range of
functional requirements for RM-tools, a set of
features mostly based on project experience in the
area of automotive and defence systems, whose aim
is helping to achieve the main goals of RM. The
most important features for our tool were gathered
from this catalogue, considering the main factors
involved in our work: the development methodology
for hybrid software that InSCo Requisite supports,
the available resources and the type of stakeholders
involved. These features are listed as follows:
 Management of unlimited projects.
 Support for scalable projects.
 Administration of users, user groups and rights
defined for each project.
 Identifiers for each project object over its
lifetime
 Support for formatting text and attachment of
non-text objects (files and diagrams)
 Control of changes for each requirement.
 Traceability through links between
requirements.
 Interoperability with other tools in order to
continue the development process.
 Documents generation.
A web-based architecture is compulsory if we want
to access applications from the Internet with a web
browser. The J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition)
platform was chosen for the development because it
offers a powerful alternative for projects of medium
and high complexity. Along with this platform, a
MVC (Model View Controller) pattern was applied
using Struts, an open-source and multiplatform
framework developed by the Apache Software
Foundation. These technologies allow the
enhancement of robustness, code reuse and a better
organization of an application that from its initial
stage was expected to become considerably
complex.
The tool is structured in a three-tier architecture,
which separates presentation logic from business
logic and persistent storage. First, the Presentation
Tier represents the client side, web browsers sending
requests using the HTTP (HyperText Transfer
Protocol) protocol to the Application Server in the
business layer, and representing the data sent back,
basically composed by HTML (HyperText Markup
Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) and
Javascript code. The Business Tier that stores the
InSCo Requisite application files and is composed
by the Apache Tomcat server. The server processes
those incoming requests, executing the appropriated
Java servlets, and exchanging data with the Data
Tier if necessary, through a JDBC (Java DataBase
Connection) connection. Finally, the Data Tier, in
charge of keeping the data persistence, is formed by
the Oracle Database Server.
InSCo Requisite is composed by two well-
differenced modules. The administration module
allows the setting of actions related to the
management of projects and users which involve the
creation of new development projects, registration of
new system users and management of user groups
and right permissions.
The system can host unlimited hybrid software
projects formed by several work groups. Users can
take part in many projects simultaneously, adopting
different roles on each one. Work teams are used as
a mechanism to classify the project users, define
roles and establish the rights permission for each
project.
INSCO REQUISITE - A Web-Based RM-Tool to support Hybrid Software Development
327

The main module guides the requirements
management of hybrid software projects covering
both business and services level defined by the
InSCo methodology.
4 USAGE OVERVIEW
The management is basically performed using
templates which are identified by means of their
prefixes; business level templates start with the BSN
prefix, whereas Services level templates use the SER
prefix (Figure 1).
A hybrid software project starts with the analysis
of the organization and the problems that can be
solved, stored in the template BSN_Project1. This
step is followed by the creation of other templates at
the business level. BSN_Goal presents the strategic
goals of the organization than can be refined in
subgoals before the services level is started.
BSN_Domain stores the information resources
needed to reach those strategic goals. Finally,
BSN_Actor describes the whole group of people or
roles implied in the project.
Figure 1: InSCO templates.
In order to complete the business model, InSCo
defines a BSN_Project2 template used to analyse the
feasibility in terms of technology and economy.
The elements of the services model are mostly
refinements of the business level templates.
SER_Functional template represents the functional
requirements of the systems refining the goals.
SER_Information describes the information
requirements refining the domain information.
Finally, SER_Non_Functional templates collect the
system restrictions.
The management is performed using HTML
forms and hyperlinks that allow the navigation
among requirements. Most templates include a Rich
Text Editor in text fields to guarantee a more
flexible description of the information. Since
requirements descriptions are performed in natural
language, it was essential to avoid ambiguity
offering a solution for a better representation of the
information. Figure 2 presents a template of a goal
specification, using the rich text feature.
Figure 2: InSCo Requisite template example.
In order to make navigation easier and to present
a global view of the relationships between the
project templates, a project explorer with a
hierarchical representation of the project content is
shown.
Most of the elements offer the possibility to
attach files and diagrams which can be used to add
important information. Templates have a validation
state that informs whether a requirement is accepted
or rejected. Changes on requirements are recorded in
a change history which shows the author, date and
the type of action performed.
The tool provides a group of reports which
present the requirements classified into different
types and, by doing so, allow their exportation to
Microsoft Excel (XLS) files.
RM-tools must provide a way to continue the
development once the requirements have been
specified. InSCo Requisite allows the
interoperability with other tools to deal with several
aspects. On the one hand, the development of the
knowledge-based section as a result of the
knowledge-intensive requirements, and, on the other
hand, the functionality based on the requirements
related to the traditional software.
It offers an option to export the project content to
Conceptual Modeling Language code. This code is
generated by the whole group of requirements
selected as knowledge intensive by the project
stakeholders.
The second approach, the functionality based on
traditional software, is performed by the use of XML
Metadata Interchange (XMI), which provides a
standard format for storing UML (Unified Modeling
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Language) models and loading those using different
UML tools without interoperability problems.
Therefore, InSCo Requisite supports the generation
of XMI files that incorporates the content of a
development project in order to import them from
other tools afterwards.
InSCo Requisite includes some facilities for
informal collaboration in the requirement
management environment. Discussions about
requirements are available where every stakeholder
can give their opinion, suggest ideas and changes.
Messages, along with the author and date are stored
in the database in order to keep a discussion log
chronologically ordered, which can be consulted
during the project lifetime.
5 CONCLUSIONS
InSCo Requisite has been presented in this paper.
This tool supports a development methodology
called InSCo which integrates SE and KE techniques
and methods.
InSCo Requisite provides the management
requirement of hybrid software projects, including
mechanisms to handle knowledge-intensive
requirements and which allows interoperability with
other tools to continue the development process
beyond requirements.
A web-based architecture has been applied in
order to facilitate the participation of distributed
work groups. The application design makes a multi-
language support possible with Spanish and English
versions.
The tool is being evaluated in the development of
a hybrid software system in the agriculture domain.
The future work is related to the enhancement of
the collaborative features and project management
aspects. An important improvement involves the
implementation of a traceability control of
requirements along the whole development process.
As far as the collaborative aspects is concerned,
virtual meetings will improve the communication
between the stakeholders. Automatic notification of
requirement changes and the subscription to
important requirements will be used to keep
stakeholder informed about the project activity.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This work is part of the Research Project TIN2004-
05694, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education
and Science.
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