Architecture for a generic requirements engineering tool

Summary form only given. Requirements engineering is a crucial part of any design process. There have been attempts made to provide the designer with tools to aid this initial design stage. A common solution adopted is to develop an in-house fix for text processing systems to support design brief expansion (DBE). This means that the expansion methodology is hard-wired into the system. To overcome the shortcoming of the methodology being built into the software the authors have looked at methodologies in terms of different levels: the information types (or data structures) manipulated by the designer; the processes operating on them; and dependency of the processes and data structures on the task/environment the designer is faced with. A particular methodology was adopted. The computer implementation uses a hypertext system as interface between the designer and the DBE process. The system provides tools for examining the expansion process and building documents, and it has a natural language processing component which helps the designer to isolate relevant bits in the brief