Improving the requirements engineering process for an electronic clearinghouse

We present experience with improving the requirements engineering process for a telecommunications electronic clearinghouse that connects multiple trading partners. Software failures and faults were traced back to problems in the semi-structured requirements, which were written as message specifications (called "business rules") in a nonstandardized format using MS Word. To remedy these problems, we first designed a highly structured representation of the. essential information in Extensible Markup Language (XML), supported by XML Schema for precisely defining the requirements structure. Second, we developed XLEdit-a custom GUI for editing the XML documents in a friendly way while preserving their information structure. Third, to assist the requirements engineers with automated migration of the existing business rules, we developed a converter for translating from MS Word to the target XML format. The investment in the technology for structured requirements editing and validation is expected to increase customer satisfaction and dramatically improve the efficiency of the clearinghouse service.