A Security Requirements Engineering Tool for Domain Engineering in Software Product Lines

Abstract

The concepts of Service-Oriented Architectures and Software Product Lines are currently being paid a considerable amount of attention, both in research and in practice. Both disciplines promise to make the development of flexible, cost-effective software systems possible and to support high levels of reuse, and may sometimes be complementary to each other. In both paradigms, security is a critical issue, although most of the existing product line practices do not comprise all the security requirements engineering activities or provide automated support through which to perform these activities, despite the fact that it is widely accepted that the application of any requirements engineering process or methodology is much more difficult without a CARE (Computer-Aided Requirements Engineering) tool, since it must be performed manually. Therefore, this chapter shall present a tool denominated as SREPPLineTool, which provides automated support through which to facilitate the application of the security quality requirements engineering process for software product lines, SREPPLine. SREPPLineTool simplifies the management of security requirements in product lines by providing us with a guided, systematic and intuitive manner in which to deal with them from the early stages of product line development, thus simplifying the management and the visualization of artefact variability and traceability links and the integration of security standards, along with the management of the security reference model proposed by SREPPLine.