Design tools for requirements engineering

Industrial software design projects often begin with a requirements capture and analysis phase. During this phase, the main architectural and behavioral requirements for a new system are collected, documented, and validated. To date, however, requirements engineers have had few reliable tools to guide and support this work. We show that a significant portion of the design requirements can be captured in formalized message sequence charts (MSCs) using a set of tools that we built to reliably create, organize, and analyze such charts.