Requirements engineering in software product line engineering

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00766-013-0189-0Many attempts have been made to increase the productivity and quality of software products based on software reuse. Software product line practice is one such approach, one that focuses on developing a family of products which have a majority of features in common. Hence, there are numerous requirements that are common across the family, but others are unique to individual products. Traditional requirements engineering methods were conceived to deal with single product requirements and are usually not flexible enough to address the needs arising from reusing requirements for a family of products. There is also the additional burden of correctly identifying and engineering both product-line-wide requirements and product-specific requirements as well as evolving them. Therefore, in this special issue, we want to highlight the importance and the role of requirements engineering for product line development as well as to provide insights into the state of the art in the field.Insfrán Pelozo, CE.; Chastek, G.; Donohoe, P.; Sampaio Do Prado Leite, JC. (2014). Requirements engineering in software product line engineering. Requirements Engineering. 19(4):331-332. doi:10.1007/s00766-013-0189-0S331332194Clements P, Northrop LM (2001) Software product lines: practices and patterns. Addison-Wesley, BostonDerakhshanmanesh M, Fox J, Ebert J (2012) Adopting feature-centric reuse of requirements assets: an industrial experience report. First international workshop on requirements engineering practices on software product line engineering, Salvador, BrazilKuloor C, Eberlein A (2002) Requirements engineering for software product lines, proceedings of the 15th international conference on software and systems engineering and their applications (ICSSEA’02), Paris, FranceNorthrop LM, Clements P (2013) A framework for software product line practice. Software engineering institute. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/productlines/tools/framework/index.cfm . Accessed 22 July 2013Yu Y, Lapouchnian A, Liaskos S, Mylopoulos J, Leite JCSP (2008) From Goals to High-Variability Software Design. Foundations of Intelligent Systems, 17th International Symposium Proceedings. ISMIS 2008. Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 4994: 1–1

Towards an Artifact-Oriented Requirements Engineering Model for Developing Successful Products, Services, and Systems: Identification of Model Requirements

Despite extensive research in the domain of requirements engineering (RE), companies still struggle with this discipline. Moreover, practitioners are challenged with developing successful products, services, and systems which address the true needs of their customers. This gives rise to a new research field in the domain of RE, namely artifact orientation. According to the literature, this artifact orientation should increase the success of RE significantly. By conducting a literature review and 7 expert interviews, we identified 7 model requirements (MRs) for an artifact-oriented RE model. Furthermore, the results of this paper suggest that existing artifact-oriented RE models do not sufficiently address all identified MRs. In particular, these models lack the combination of traditional RE practices, such as goal orientation, documentation, and traceability with novel agile approaches. Furthermore, there is a need for a more holistic RE which merges the domains of product, service, and software engineering

A systematic literature review on the semi-automatic configuration of extended product lines

Product line engineering has become essential in mass customisation given its ability to reduce production costs and time to market, and to improve product quality and customer satisfaction. In product line literature, mass customisation is known as product configuration. Currently, there are multiple heterogeneous contributions in the product line configuration domain. However, a secondary study that shows an overview of the progress, trends, and gaps faced by researchers in this domain is still missing. In this context, we provide a comprehensive systematic literature review to discover which approaches exist to support the configuration process of extended product lines and how these approaches perform in practice. Extend product lines consider non-functional properties in the product line modelling. We compare and classify a total of 66 primary studies from 2000 to 2016. Mainly, we give an in-depth view of techniques used by each work, how these techniques are evaluated and their main shortcomings. As main results, our review identified (i) the need to improve the quality of the evaluation of existing approaches, (ii) a lack of hybrid solutions to support multiple configuration constraints, and (iii) a need to improve scalability and performance conditions

A holistic approach to feature modeling for product line requirements engineering

Requirements engineering (RE) offers the means to discover, model, and manage the requirements of the products that comprise a product line, while software product line engineering (SPLE) offers the means of realizing the products’ requirements from a common base of software assets. In practice, however, RE and SPLE have proven to be less complementary than they should. While some RE techniques, particularly goal modeling, support the exploration of alternative solutions, the appropriate solution is typically conditional on context and a large product line may have many product-defining contexts. Thus, scalability and traceability through into product line features are key challenges for RE. Feature modeling, by contrast, has been widely accepted as a way of modeling commonality and variability of products of a product line that may be very complex. In this paper, we propose a goal-driven feature modeling approach that separates a feature space in terms of problem space and solution space features, and establish explicit mappings between them. This approach contributes to reducing the inherent complexity of a mixed-view feature model, deriving key engineering drivers for developing core assets of a product line, and facilitating the quality-based product configuration

Modeling and Selection of Software Service Variants

Providers and consumers have to deal with variants, meaning alternative instances of a service?s design, implementation, deployment, or operation, when developing or delivering software services. This work presents service feature modeling to deal with associated challenges, comprising a language to represent software service variants and a set of methods for modeling and subsequent variant selection. This work?s evaluation includes a POC implementation and two real-life use cases