Using Visual Studio Extensibility Mechanisms for Requirements Specification

Although software requirements engineering is an essential activity for the successful development of information systems, most of the existing software development environments do not provide support for requirements specification. They concentrate on the development activities, such as code edition, solution management, components testing and deployment, change and configuration management, or integration with modeling artifacts. The Visual Studio .NET IDE is one of the most popular development workbenches, profiting from years of Microsoft experience in developing tools to enhance and automate the tasks of the developer, but still has no support for requirements specification. In this paper we describe how Visual Studio .NET extensibility mechanisms have been used to support the development of a new requirements specification initiative, which we have called ProjectIT-Requirements.