Tool Support and Specification Quality: Experimental Validation of an RE-Tool Evaluation Framework

Automated support for the requirements engineering (RE) process is a recognised research area. However, the practice still relies on office tools rather than RE-tools. Reasons include financial causes and difficulty to evaluate the available RE-tools. This work reports on an experiment trying to validate a previously proposed framework for evaluating RE-tools. The experiment participants used several alternative tools for making requirements specifications, and then evaluated the tools by means of the framework. This enables us to look at the participants� performance with the various tools, evaluation approaches, and their perceptions about the same tools. The findings indicate advantages of using the evaluation framework, and of combining several evaluation techniques. The experiment indicates that RE-tools provide better support than office tools, leading to higher quality specifications.