An eclipse plug-in to model system requirements and adaptation capabilities

Requirements elicitation is an important phase of the software life-cycle, since it helps to reduce the software development time and costs. Unfortunately, existing tools for software design are mainly focused on building a “solution” (i.e., the software system), and neglect the elicitation and analysis of the stakeholders’ requirements. Besides, systems are constantly required to adapt to cope with the variability of the environment in which they operate. For this reason, self-adaptation must be also taken into account during requirements elicitation.This paper proposes a graphical designer to express the conventional (functional and non functional) requirements together with the adaptation capabilities of the system. It has been developed as an Eclipse plug-in and leverages other Eclipse projects, such as EMF [1], GMP [2] and Xtext [3], which helped us to make the designer usable and extensible.