Architectural design of an intelligent requirements engineering tool

Research in requirements engineering has resulted in various techniques, methods and frameworks but tool support is currently still very limited. It has been recognized that the lack of intelligent support tools for flexible, reliable, and adaptable requirements engineering processes is a major issue that prevents organizations from improving their requirements engineering practices. In order to implement tools that offer intelligent support for requirements engineering processes, a web-based multitier software architecture is proposed in this paper. An intelligent support tool using this architecture can support scalable software projects and can be adapted to different requirements engineering processes. Based on this architecture we have implemented a web-based tool for the "Requirements acquisition and specification for telecommunication services" (RATS) process. It can be configured to run on a standalone computer or in an enterprise environment.