A UML Profile and Tool Support for Evolutionary Requirements Engineering

In this paper, we present a method to perform the first steps of software evolution, namely evolutionary requirements engineering, where new requirements have to be analyzed in the context of a set of already given requirements. The basic idea is to adjust an existing requirements engineering process so that evolution is supported. In the requirements engineering process we consider, the original software development problem is decomposed into a number of subproblems that are analyzed according to the problem frame approach. Evolution is performed by defining rules for each process step and each document that is generated in the respective step to incorporate the new evolution requirements into the existing requirements documents or to create, when necessary, additional documents. We show that the evolution task benefits from the chosen problem decomposition. The described software evolution method is tool-supported. Our tool UML4PF, which is based on the Eclipse Modeling Framework, supports the problem frame approach to software engineering by a specifically defined UML profile. We extend that profile so that it also covers software evolution.