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Useme is a collaborative tool that automates the capture and the subsequent maintenance of user requirements for new software functionality. The tool facilitates the utilization of industry standards and best practices in requirements capture. Useme is based upon a number of industry standard technologies, the most relevant of which are the Eclipse Tools Platform and the Glassfish Java J5EE application server.

The essential problems with requirements management today are as follows:

• 1. The normally affordable requirements related tools existing today ultimately rely on the definition of a requirements document via a free form text editor. This inevitably leads to two pernicious consequences: (1) inconsistencies between documents produced by different team members (2) document incorrectness or invalidity with respect to the underlying technologies being utilized (for example, use case specification documents with alternate flows that are missing their points of origin or return). The result of this is lack of clarity in the requirements, confusion among the various roles in the development team and therefore danger of code defects and/or unnecessary waste of time.
• 2. Even if development teams utilize document templates to aid document standardization, the lack of a well defined and enforceable structure in the textual documents makes this task of standardization quite difficult, especially in large teams in which the rate of change of analysts and requirements specifiers on a given project is high.
• 3. Most organizations that are committed to UML as a common language for team communication often experience a gap between the UML requirements model and the textual specification documents. The model describes requirements as simple elements (for example use cases and actors) and the structural relationships between such elements (for example use case inclusion). The specification documents describe the details of each specific requirement but frequently loose the connectivity of the model due to the difficulty of capturing structural relationship within a textual context. The two types of artifacts are therefore mismatched and inconsistent, creating an obstacle instead of easing the transformation of the requirements model into the application.
• 4. Even in cases where at least the most important of the relationships are captured in the textual documentation, the task of maintaining them by hand through requirements evolution and change is daunting for the amount of time and effort that is needed. The result is a set of documents with obsolete and often misleading information.
• 5. Except for very expensive, high end requirements management tools, most other automated systems are single user, making it difficult for team members to work on requirements documents as a community and for all the project stakeholders in general to share the information expressed in these documents. When requirements are managed by hand, the problem is of course exacerbated, with different versions of one and the same document being used as the working copy.
• 6. All requirements management tools available today are standalone applications, with their own user interfaces and their own utilization rules and procedures, with the well known shortcomings of a non integrated development environment.

All these issues can be overcome by the use of an appropriately designed automation tool for requirements management. Useme is, its makers believe, that tool.

“We have been committed to open source since the very earliest times of the movement, going back to the days when Gnu software was championing the cause”, says Joel Rosi-Schwartz, Etish Director and, as he likes to label himself, Useme's chief cook and bottle washer. "Over the intervening years we have made small but, we like to believe, helpful contributions to various open source efforts. Today we finally find ourselves in the position of being able to offer a major software application which, we feel, will make a significant difference in developers productivity and effectiveness. It is our sincere hope that this returns a small portion of what we have received from the open source community over the years."

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