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

Capturing variability in Model Based Systems Engineering

International audienceAutomotive model-based systems engineering needs to be dapted to the industry specific needs, in particular by implementing appropriate means of representing and operating with variability. We rely on existing modeling techniques as an opportunity to provide a description of variability adapted to a systems en- gineering model. However, we also need to take into account requirements related to backwards compatibility with current practices, given the industry experience in mass customization. We propose to adopt the product line paradigm in model-based systems engineering by extending the orthogonal variability model, and adapting it to our specific needs. This brings us to an expression closer to a description of constraints, related to both orthogonal variability, and to SysML system models. We introduce our approach through a discussion on the different aspects that need to be covered for expressing variability in systems engineering. We explore these aspects by observing an automotive case study, and relate them to a list of contextual requirements for variability management

Incremental Reconfiguration of Product Specific Use Case Models for Evolving Configuration Decisions

[Context and motivation] Product Line Engineering (PLE) is increasingly common practice in industry to develop complex systems for multiple customers with varying needs. In many business contexts, use cases are central development artifacts for requirements engineering and system testing. In such contexts, use case configurators can play a significant role to capture variable and common requirements in Product Line (PL) use case models and to generate Product Specific (PS) use case models for each new customer in a product family. [Question/Problem] Although considerable research has been devoted to use case configurators, little attention has been paid to supporting the incremental reconfiguration of use case models with evolving configuration decisions. [Principal ideas/results] We propose, apply, and assess an incremental reconfiguration approach to support evolving configuration decisions in PL use case models. PS use case models are incrementally reconfigured by focusing only on the changed decisions and their side effects. In our prior work, we proposed and applied Product line Use case modeling Method (PUM) to support variability modeling in PL use case diagrams and specifications. We also developed a use case configurator, PUMConf, which interactively collects configuration decisions from analysts to generate PS use case models from PL models. Our approach is built on top of PUM and PUMConf. [Contributions] We provide fully automated tool support for incremental configuration as an extension of PUMConf. Our approach has been evaluated in an industrial case study in the automotive domain, which provided evidence it is practical and beneficial

Swallow-related quality of life and oropharyngeal dysphagia in myotonic dystrophy

Purpose: This study describes swallow-related quality of life (SWAL-QOL) in patients with myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) and investigates its association with swallowing function and disease severity. Methods: A SWAL-QOL questionnaire was completed by 75 DM1 patients and 25 healthy control subjects. The severity of the disease was evaluated using the muscular impairment rating scale (MIRS). Twenty-eight DM1 patients underwent a videofluroscopic swallowing examination (VFS). Spearman’s correlation coefficient was used to measure the direction and strength of associations. Results: The SWAL-QOL median scores were significantly lower for the DM1 group than for the healthy control group. The scores for the majority of the SWAL-QOL domains were lower in patients with proximal muscular weakness (MIRS 4 and 5). Postswallow vallecular pooling and piecemeal deglutition were the most impaired VFS outcome variables. Conclusion: Our results suggest that a multidimensional swallowing assessment is recommended for DM1 patients as SWAL-QOL and VFS measure different aspects of the swallowing function, thus providing complementary information

From goals to high-variability software design

Software requirements consist of functionalities and qualities to be accommodated during design. Through goal-oriented requirements engineering, stakeholder goals are refined into a space of alternative functionalities. We adopt this framework and propose a decision-making process to generate a generic software design that can accommodate the full space of alternatives each of which can fulfill stakeholder goals. Specifically, we present a process for generating complementary design views from a goal model with high variability in configurations, behavioral specifications, architectures and business processes