Evaluation of Open Source Tools for Requirements Management

Requirements management is a critical task in any Software Engineering project. It implies both a technological defy and a complex social process. Engineering Requirements tools (ER) help speed up and optimize ER processes through a formal and systematical management of requirements, change management and traceability. In general, tools available for that use are proprietary software, costly and difficult to work with. Open source tools offer a great potential to cover these needs. This work aims to analyze open source requirements management tools to evaluate their capabilities and contribution for each step of the ER process. It includes a comparative analysis of their performance in three scenarios, representing different levels of software development organizations' requests. Results show that development of open source requirements management tools is more oriented towards elicitation and requirements analysis phases than modeling.