Requirements Analysis & Design Tools

Behavioral / Data / Object /Functional Modeling An abstract representation of the desired and permissible states and state transitions for an application, typically in response to external stimuli such as physical events, process sensors or human actions; often based on finite state machine or petri net theory. Identifying the logical structure of data elements and their relationships to each other for a specific application, independent of the implementation medium; creating an abstract representation of the application's data; usually includes entities, attributes, relationships, domains, valid ranges, edit rules, referential integrity rules, expected data volumes and access rates. Creating an abstract representation of an application in terms of its relevant objects, object relationships, object attributes, object services, inter-object Creating an abstract representation of an application in terms of its functional requirements, often as a textual requirements document and one or more derivatives (e.g., a functional decomposition diagram).

Requirements Elicitation /Validation Gathering functional, operational and performance requirements from the users and approvers of an application in a manner that ensures their satisfaction with the end product. Making sure that the stated requirements fully meet the needs of the target user; often this is done through application prototyping or operational simulations.

Requirements Tracking Establishing the correspondence between functional and other external requirements and the work products of the development process, including final deliverables and all intermediate products; both forward and reverse tracking are needed to ensure that all requirements are satisfied and that no superfluous features have been introduced; also useful in establishing testing and QA strategies for a project.