In it's current form, SEURAT can best be described as a research prototype. SEURAT can be installed using the Eclipse Update Manager (Help -> Software Updates -> Find and Install then select Search for New Features and New Remote Site). If you are interested in installing SEURAT, please e-mail us at the contact information available at the bottom of the page so we can send you the URL for the installation. We are very interested in receiving feedback on the tool.

In addition to the SEURAT plugin, you will need to install the following:

Eclipse (we are using 3.5)
Java (1.5.x or newer)

This version of SEURAT (as of 17 August 2009) has been extended by some CSA Capstone students to use the Derby Database (thanks to Sean Hanna, James Moler, and Ryan Wagner).The Derby option will allow you to run in stand-alone mode. Otherwise, you will need to install and run MySQL 5 to share ratioale between users.

)nce you are running SEURAT, you can set the preferences to point to the database you want to work with and provide the username and password you wish to use with your MySQL installation. Any account with CREATE, DELETE, INSERT, SELECT, UPDATE privileges will work. Note: you will NOT want to work with the default database SEURAT_Base since it contains random information (whatever was there when I created the install site) you will want to create a new set of rationale to work with (see instructions in the On-Line Help).

After the preferences are set, you can load the two SEURAT views: the Rationale Explorer and the Rationale Task List (Window -> Show View -> Other, then select the views under RationaleExplorer Category and SEURAT) . If you change the database name using the Preference page after the views have been loaded you can re-load the database using the "Change Rationale DB" option on the Rationale Explorer pull-down menu.

The on-line help is a bit out of date and does not describe some of SEURAT's newest features:

• Candidate Rationale import – you can tag Word documents as rationale and import it into SEURAT
• Moving items in the rationale tree – this lets us create/change the hierarchy
• Importing and Exporting feature models using rationale – this is a new project that allows us to create rationale from a feature model describing a product line and then export a feature model describing a product

Contact me if you have questions or need more information on any of those features.