An Integrated Requirements Engineering Framework for Agile Software Product Lines

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) techniques play a determinant role within Agile Product Lines development methods; these notably allow to establish the relevance to adopt or not the product line approach for software-intensive systems production. This paper proposes an integrated goal and feature-based meta-model for agile software product lines development. The main objective is to permit the sepecification of the requirements that precisely capture stakeholder’s needs and intentions as well as the management of product line variabilities. Adopting practices from requirements engineering, especially goal and feature models, helps designing the domain and application engineering tiers of an agile product line. Such an approach allows a holistic perspective integrating human, organizational and agile aspects to better understand product lines dynamic business environments. It helps bridging the gap be-tween product lines structures and requirements models, and proposes an integrated framework to all actors involved in the product line architecture. In this paper we show how our proposed metamodel can be applied to the requirements engineering stage of an agile product line development mainly for feature-oriented agile product lines such as our own methodology called AgiFPL.