The requirements engineering for software development may be divided geographically where the clients (or customers) and software development team are in different states, countries, or continents. In a software development project, a centralized documentation is favorable to produce the requirements document. The distributed database allows the users to store data in different locations thus improving reliability. The requirements for the web based feature of the proposed CASE tool are as follows: 1.1 The tool must have two interfaces, the client interface and the server interface. The
client interface is a web-based interface which is accessed using a browser. The server interface allows the administrator to control the access and the database of the server software.
1.2 The tool must have a server application that has access to a relational database management system. The use of relational database management system allows the query and selection of the data in the database much reliable than a centralized database.
1.3 The client interface of the tool must function in standard web browsers. A web-based interface using a web browser has many chances of crashing at the time of runtime. By defining standard web browsers such as Safari, Internet explorer, Google chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera allows the developer to test the tool in these web browsers to limit the crashes.
1.4 The user must be provided access privileges for the server and database access. The users of the requirements engineering tool may vary as customers, software
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engineers, software project managers, requirements engineer, and other stakeholders of the project may use the CASE tool. The tool must provide limited access or full access depending on the task required by the user of the CASE tool. The access privilege may vary from different users and also different projects for the same user. 1.5 The user must be provided with a login ID and password by the administrator. The
provision of registering a user in a closed group project is crucial. The tool administrator should be in charge assigning user access privileges for each project. These access privileges may vary from time to time depending on the project requirements, change in management, or change in customers. Therefore, administrator should be able to change the user‟s access at any time in the software project development life cycle.
1.6 The tool must be installed and configured on a server. The tool must follow configuration procedures at the server side. A software company should be provided with the server software which should be installed in a secure server. The server should be able to support a large database depending on the number of projects and users that will access the CASE tool. The server software should be independent of the operating system platform of the installed server. The server shall be connected to the World Wide Web (WWW) to provide access to all users across geographical boundaries.
1.7 The user account must be unique and secure. Each user is given a login ID and password by the administrator. There should not be more than one identical login ID
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to access the server software. The password should be able to be changed by the user of the CASE tool after the first login by the user.
1.8 The user privilege must specify the project access and access privileges. The project access of a user may vary from one to many projects. The access privilege in each project will vary according to the type of the project. In the case of a software engineer, that user may have only one project access, but a software project manager can have access to more than one project.
1.9 The access privileges for the user must be either read/edit or read only. The read only access allows user to view the requirements and not make any changes to the requirements. The software engineers, customers, and end users of the software project should have only the read access. The read/edit access allows users to both view and update the requirements in the CASE tool. Usually the requirements engineers or the project managers have the read/edit access privilege.
1.10 The user must be able to login to the server using a web browser. The server software can be accessed using the specific URL for each of the specific servers. The URL takes the user to the login page. The login page prompts the user to enter the login ID and password. Only then will the user gain access to the CASE tool.
1.11 The user must be able to navigate through each of the web pages of the tool. The index page of CASE tool is the project access summary and the user activities in the past. Every web page of the CASE tool must have a Home button to navigate to index page. The CASE tool must have all the tabs for each support offered by the tool in every page.
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1.12 The server application must be able to handle at most one hundred users at a time. Depending on the industry requirements and the database that a server can handle the maximum number of users should be limited to one hundred users for each server application in each server.
Figure5.1: Use Case diagram for the web based CASE tool