Providing software product line knowledge to requirements engineers --- a template for elicitation instructions

  • Authors:
  • Sebastian Adam

  • Affiliations:
  • Fraunhofer IESE, Kaiserslautern, Germany

  • Venue:
  • REFSQ'12 Proceedings of the 18th international conference on Requirements Engineering: foundation for software quality
  • Year:
  • 2012

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

[Context & Motivation] Developing new software systems based on a software product line (SPL) in so-called application engineering (AE) projects is still a time-consuming and expensive task. Especially when a large number of customer-specific requirements exists, there is still no systematic support for efficiently aligning these non-anticipated requirements with SPL characteristics early on. [Question/problem] In order to improve this process significantly, sound knowledge about an SPL must be available when guiding the requirements elicitation during AE. Thus, an appropriate reflection of SPL characteristics in process-supporting artifacts is indispensable for actually supporting a requirements engineer in this task. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, a validated template for elicitation instructions that aims at providing a requirements engineer with knowledge about an underlying SPL in an appropriate manner is presented. This template consists of predefined text blocks and algorithms that explain how SPL-relevant product and process knowledge can be systematically reflected into capability-aware elicitation instructions. [Contribution] By using such elicitation instructions, requirements engineers are enabled to elicit requirements in an AE project more effectively.