Everything always works the way it's supposed to right? The importance of tool integration and customization in today's development programs

摘要

In theory, the relationships between customer needs and requirements, design artifacts, and what is actually built are straight forward. In practice, it is not always as simple as one would think. Tools used to develop today's Architecture's cover a broad landscape that is complicated by a multitude of tools for requirements management, analysis and design, and development environments. Further complicating the issue can be customer mandates for usage of specific tools, toolsets, or Integrated Development Environments (IDE's). This paper describes how the overall requirements hierarchy and the traceability to design artifacts were established and implemented for a medium sized program. The integration of the requirements management tool, DOORS, with IBM's Rational Software Architect (RSA) using a third party tool, DOORKeeper, will be described. Finally, the development of customized tools for the standardization and automation of requirements and design metrics gathering will be described.