Effective Requirements Engineering for CSE Projects: A Lightweight Tool

Requirements engineering (RE) is crucial for software projects. However, formal requirements engineering is often ignored in scientific software projects. To enhance the quality of scientific software and to adopt more good software engineering practices, we claim that requirements need to be elicited and specified. We present DRUMS Board, which supports lightweight requirements elicitation. DRUMS Board is easy to learn and easy to use. Scientists who have little or no prior RE knowledge can effectively create and manage requirements with low effort. To evaluate the effectiveness of DRUMS Board, a controlled experiment was conducted in the domain of computational fluid dynamics. The evaluation results show that using DRUMS Board has a significant effect on the number and innovativeness of generated ideas in the requirements elicitation process.