A case-study of requirements reuse through product families

  • Authors:

  • W. Lam

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computer Science, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield, Herts AL10 9AB, UK E-mail: W.Lam@ herts.ac.uk

  • Venue:
  • Annals of Software Engineering
  • Year:
  • 1998

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Abstract

Increasingly, software organisations are looking towards large‐scale reuse as a way of improving productivity, raising quality and reducing delivery timescales. Many in the reuse community have suggested notions of product‐line development and domain engineering life‐cycles. Achieving these in practice, however, requires a systematic process for “early” reuse (requirements reuse) as well as late reuse (code reuse). This paper discusses pratical experience of early reuse. We describe FORE (Family Of REquirements), an approach that we have developed in our work in the domain of aircraft engine control systems. The FORE approach concentrates on the definition of a generic product concept and the formalisation of its requirements. We describe the FORE approach in general terms, and then show how it has been applied in an industrial case‐study. We make an initial evaluation of the FORE approach (and early reuse in general) in terms of how it has changed an existing requirements engineering process. We compare the FORE approach to related work in early reuse, and draw some conclusions about how the approach may scale to other problems.