Requirements as First-Class Citizens: Integrating Requirements closely with Implementation Artifacts

Requirements often play second fiddle in software development projects. The tools for managing requirements often just support ”numbered lists of prose paragraphs”, and they don’t integrate well with the tools used for implementing the system. This leads to all kinds of challenges in terms of versioning and traceability. Moreover, because they are mainly prose text, they cannot easily be checked for consistency and completeness, limiting their usefulness. In this paper we describe an alternative approach, where requirements are (at least partially) formalized to support consistency checking, where parts of requirements can be used directly as the implementation, and where requirements are managed with the same tools that are used for system development. The approach is illustrated with the mbeddr system, a comprehensive IDE for embedded software development based on an extensible version of C and domain-specific languages.