Software Product Line Requirements Research Articles

Extracting core requirements for software product lines

Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is a promising paradigm for reusing knowledge and artifacts among similar software products. However, SPLE methods and techniques require a high up-front investment and hence are profitable if several similar software products are developed. Thus in practice adoption of SPLE commonly takes a bottom-up approach, in which analyzing the commonality and variability of existing products and transforming them into reusable ones (termed core assets) are needed. These time-consuming and error-prone tasks call for automation. The literature partially deals with solutions for early software development stages, mainly in the form of variability analysis. We aim for further creation of core requirements—reusable requirements that can be adapted for different software products. To this end, we introduce an automated extractive method, named CoreReq, to generate core requirements from product requirements written in a natural language. The approach clusters similar requirements, captures variable parts utilizing natural language processing techniques, and generates core requirements following an ontological variability framework. Focusing on cloning scenarios, we evaluated CoreReq through examples and a controlled experiment. Based on the results, we claim that core requirements generation with CoreReq is feasible and usable for specifying requirements of new similar products in cloning scenarios.

A Framework for Managing Requirements of Software Product Lines

An emerging problem in the Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is the need for integral management of planned reuse. In SPLE there are two instances where managing requirements gains relevance. The first one arises during the construction of SPLs based on legacy software or previously developed SPLs. The second one appears when instantiating products from the SPLplatform, where instantiating variability meets the custom requirements of each product. The objective of this paper is to define a framework that allows management of requirements using Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval techniques, to structure, clean, index and find reusable functionalities according to those requirements. This framework is built in a way that allows the combination of such techniques to evaluate the best combinations for finding the correct functionalities in each SPL domain.

An Incremental Approach to Manage Variability in Software Product Line Requirements

An Incremental Approach to Manage Variability in Software Product Line Requirements

An Ontological Rule-Based Approach for Analyzing Dead and False Optional Features in Feature Models

Feature models are a common way to represent variability requirements of software product lines by expressing the set of feature combinations that software products can have. Assuring quality of feature models is thus of paramount importance for assuring quality in software product line engineering. However, feature models can have several types of defects that disminish benefits of software product line engineering.Two of such defects are dead features and false optional features. Several state-of-the-art techniques identify these defects, but only few of them tackle the problem of identifying their causes. Besides, the explanations they provide are cumbersome and hard to understand by humans. In this paper, we propose an ontological rule-based approach to: (a) identify dead and false optional features; (b)identify certain causes of these defects; and (c) explain these causes in natural language helping modelers to correct found defects. We represent our approach with a feature model taken from literature. A preliminary empirical evaluation of our approach over 31 FMs shows that our proposal is effective, accurate and scalable to 150 features.

Secure Tropos framework for software product lines requirements engineering

Security and requirements engineering are two of the most important factors of success in the development of a software product line (SPL). Goal-driven security requirements engineering approaches, such as Secure Tropos, have been proposed as a suitable paradigm for elicitation of security requirements and their analysis on both a social and a technical dimension. Nevertheless, goal-driven security requirements engineering methodologies are not appropriately tailored to the specific demands of SPL, while on the other hand specific proposals of SPL engineering have traditionally ignored security requirements. This paper presents work that fills this gap by proposing “SecureTropos-SPL” framework.

Capturing consumer preferences as requirements for software product lines

Delivering great consumer experiences in competitive market conditions requires software vendors to move away from traditional modes of thinking to an outside-in perspective, one that shifts their business to becoming consumer-centric. Requirements engineers operating in these conditions thus need new means to both capture real preferences of consumers and then relate them to requirements for software customized in different ways to fit anyone. Additionally, because system development models require inputs that are more concrete than abstract, the indistinct values of consumers need to be classified and formalized. To address this challenge, this study aims to establish a conceptual link between preferences of consumers and system requirements, using software product line (SPL) as a means for systematically accommodating the variations within the preferences. The novelty of this study is a conceptual model of consumer preference, which integrates generic value frameworks from both psychology and marketing, and a method for its transformation to requirements for SPL using a goal-oriented RE framework as the mediator. The presented artifacts are grounded in an empirical study related to the development of a system for online education.

Managing and Analysing Software Product Line Requirements

Modelling software product line (SPL) features plays a crucial role to a successful development of SPL. Feature diagram is one of the widely used notations to model SPL variants. However, there is a lack of precisely defined formal notations for representing and verifying such models. This paper presents an approach that we adopt to model SPL variants by using UML and subsequently verify them by using first-order logic. UML provides an overall modelling view of the system. First-order logic provides a precise and rigorous interpretation of the feature diagrams. We model variants and their dependencies by using propositional connectives and build logical expressions. These expressions are then validated by the Alloy verification tool. The analysis and verification process is illustrated by using Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) system.

A model-driven approach for the derivation of architectural requirements of software product lines

The alignment of the software architecture and the functional requirements of a system is a demanding task because of the difficulty in tracing design elements to requirements. The four-step rule set (4SRS) is a unified modeling language (UML)-based model-driven method for single system development which provides support to the software architect in this task. This paper presents an evolution of the 4SRS method aimed at software product lines. In particular, we describe how to address the transformation of functional requirements (use cases) into component-based requirements for the product line architecture. The result is a UML-based model-driven method that can be applied in combination with metamodeling tools such as the eclipse modeling framework (EMF) to derive the architecture of software product lines. We present our approach in a practical way and illustrate it with an example. We also discuss how our proposals are related to the work of other authors.