Title
Extracting core requirements for software product lines
Abstract
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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.1007/s00766-018-0307-0
Requirements Engineering
Keywords
Field
DocType
Software Product Line Engineering,Systematic reuse,Requirements specification,Variability analysis
USable,Systems engineering,Reuse,Computer science,Automation,Natural language,Software,Software product line,Software requirements specification,Software development
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
25
1
1432-010X
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
28
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Iris Reinhartz-Berger135239.70
Mark Kemelman200.34