Overview of Requirements Engineering Process for Software Product Lines

Software Product Lines is an important strategy to minimize costs and time-to market, and maximize quality and productivity of the software development. It involves the management of variabilities and commonalities among several applications, which increases its complexity compared to traditional software development. In this context, a Requirements Engineering and management are central tasks, important to reduce the risks involved in a development of product line. System requirements must be properly identified, analysed and reviewed in order to provide adequate solution to manage variabilities and integrating them for making easy the products derivation. In this paper Requirements Engineering process and techniques used in some of the product line practices are reviewed and discussed. Also, Requirements Engineering techniques for traditional single product software development are analysed and their applicability in product line development is assessed. This work is licensed under a&nbsp;Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.</p

A case study on variability management in software product lines: identifying why real-life projects fail

Economies of scale can be seen as some kind of “holy grail” in state of the art literature on the development of sets of related software systems. Software product line methods are often mentioned in this context, due to the variability management aspects they propose, in order to deal with sets of related software systems. They realize the sought-after reusability. Both variability management and software product lines already have a strong presence in theoretical research, but in real-life software product line projects trying to obtain economies of scale still tend to fall short of target. The objective of this paper is to study this gap between theory and reality through a case study in order to see why such gap exists, and to find a way to bridge this gap. Through analysis of the causes of failure identified by the stakeholders in the case study, the underlying problem, which is found to be located in the requirements engineering phase, is crystallized. The identification of a framework describing the problems will provide practitioners with a better focus for future endeavors in the field of software product lines, so that economies of scale can be achieved

Building a requirements engineering methodology for software product lines

Software product lines are a great way to achieve reusability when they are correctly implemented. Theories about the product line paradigm already exist for multiple decades, but empirical research and reports of real life success stories are still scarce. Companies often still struggle to implement a software product line, because they don’t possess the necessary knowledge and therefore do not sufficiently focus on the most basic aspect of a product line, namely the variability. Variability is the key to systematic and successful reuse, and should be considered as soon as possible in any software engineering project. The goal of the research is to develop a methodology for dealing explicitly with variability in software product lines during requirements engineering, because its impact will be maximal during this phase of software engineering. The methodology will be developed based on case-study research, in order to ensure practical relevance.status: publishe