| Early stages of the software development lifecycle require significant specification work. Robust software specification lays solid foundation for the development of a software specification project. Research shows that errors and omissions in requirements gathering, software specification, and design phases are among the costliest mistakes that can occur during software development. Yet very often software projects can track roots of many issues to the lack of clear and precise software specifications.;The WebStorm software presented in this thesis is a UML-based web enabled CASE tool that focuses on the early stages of software engineering that lead towards software design of a project. The WebStorm project is an expansion of STORM [Fritz06], a standalone prototype for software specification and modeling by Eric Fritzinger. WebStorm fully re-designs, re-develops and improves many STORM capabilities. It focuses on textual aspects of software specification, offering easy to use management of requirements, actors, use cases, and scenarios etc. and their relationships. This thesis presents a description of the WebStorm approach to software specification and web-based management and sharing of software specification in a multi-user environment. It describes in detail the WebStorm concepts, architecture, specification, and design. The prototype chapter thoroughly covers WebStorm's operation, including the significantly improved graphical interface to create and manage use cases and scenarios, and generate the specification document in WebStorm. We also compare WebStorm with several related CASE tools and list future work opportunities to expand WebStorm's functionality and capabilities. |
