RED-PL, a Method for Deriving Product Requirements from a Product Line Requirements Model

Abstract

Abstract. Software product lines (SPL) modeling has proven to be an effective approach to reuse in software development. Several variability approaches were developed to plan requirements reuse, but only little of them actually address the issue of deriving product requirements. Indeed, while the modeling approaches sell on requirements reuse, the associated derivation techniques actually focus on deriving and reusing technical product data. This paper presents a method that intends to support requirements derivation. Its underlying principle is to take advantage of approaches made for reuse PL requirements and to complete them by a requirements development process by reuse for single products. The proposed approach matches users' product requirements with PL requirements models and derives a collection of requirements that is (i) consistent, and (ii) optimal with respect to users' priorities and company's constraints. The proposed methodological process was validated in an industrial setting by considering the requirement engineering phase of a product line of blood analyzers.

Constraints: The core of product line engineering

“…Although only long term experience shall provide a definitive answer to this question, one might be interested in looking for special constraints that could be specified in a real case. To do so, we have used our CP over Finite Domains (FD) approach to specify constraints on a family of blood analysis automatons [19] in the context of a cooperation with the partner industry STAGO.…”

“…In [19], we have demonstrated how to specify constraints on attributes to reason on goal based product configuration, to guide for example a cost/benefit analysis of products during their configuration.…”

On the generation of requirements specifications from software engineering models: A systematic literature review

“…use cases, goals, UML, aspects). In [22], Djebbi and Salinesi use Integer Linear Programming (ILP) for similarity analysis. Ms Excel was used to apply ILP to a case study on blood analyzers developed in the STAGO Instruments Company.…”

“…Djebbi and Salinesi's ongoing research into RED-PL (Requirements Elicitation & Derivation for Product Lines) [22] (S29) is aimed at defining a method for product requirements derivation in SPLs. Unlike previous approaches, RED-PL does not consist of selecting a product configuration from a SPL variability model in order to retrieve the requirements specifying the product to be built.…”

Recommendation Heuristics for Improving Product Line Configuration Processes

“…The specification of requirements in the context of PLs is called a configuration process. In PLE, a configuration process is a step-wise process, with the objective to deliver configurations that both satisfy the domain constraints, provided by the product line model, and the stakeholders' requirements, which can be specified too [13]. Dealing with PL constraints in domain and application engineering has been the subject of extensive literature that suggests different approaches, mostly based on constraint and satisfiability (SAT) problem solving [24], [28].…”