RED-PL, a Method for Deriving Product Requirements from a Product Line Requirements Model

International audienceSoftware product lines (SPL) modeling has proven to be an effective approach to reuse in software development. Several variability approaches were developed to plan requirements reuse, but only little of them actually address the issue of deriving product requirements. Indeed, while the modeling approaches sell on requirements reuse, the associated derivation techniques actually focus on deriving and reusing technical product data.This paper presents a method that intends to support requirements derivation.Its underlying principle is to take advantage of approaches made for reuse PL requirements and to complete them by a requirements development process by reuse for single products. The proposed approach matches users' product requirements with PL requirements models and derives a collection ofrequirements that is (i) consistent, and (ii) optimal with respect to users' priorities and company's constraints. The proposed methodological process was validated in an industrial setting by considering the requirement engineering phase of a product line of blood analyzers

Reifying Configuration Management for Object-Oriented Software

Using a solid Software Configuration Management (SCM) is mandatory to establish and maintain the integrity of the products of a software project throughout the project’s software life cycle. Even with the help of sophisticated tools, handling the various dimensions of SCM can be a daunting (and costly) task for many projects. The contribution of this paper is to propose a method (based on the use Creational Design Patterns) to simplify SCM by reifying the variants of an object-oriented software system into language-level objects; and to show that newly available compilation technology makes this proposal attractive with respect to performance (memory footprint and execution time) by inferring which classes are needed for a specific configuration and optimizing the generated code accordingly. We demonstrate this idea on an artificial case study intended to be representative of a properly designed OO software. All the performance figures we get are obtained with freely available software, and, since the source code of our case study is also freely available, they are easily reproducible and checkable