Writing correct and consistent software requirements specification (SRS) is one of the most important goals of a requirements engineering process. The SRS serves as the basis for subsequent design, testing and maintenance of the software product. The more errors and inconsistencies contained in an SRS, the more time and efforts are required to correct them at a later stage in the development process. Most SRS documents are manually typed using a word processor and hence the writer is responsible for ensuring the correctness and consistency of the document. Without adequate tool support, the manual construction and analysis of SRS documents is a tedious process and is error-prone. This paper describes an interactive tool developed at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse that assists students preparing an SRS document based on the IEEE standard 8301998. The tool provides an easy-to-use interface and the ability to create, edit, load and save SRS documents. In addition, it evaluates the requirements document based on criteria published by the Software Metrics program at the Software Assurance Technology Center, NASA. A function-point metrics analyzer is also built into the tool so that the efforts required to complete the project specified in the document can be evaluated.
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