Promoting modularity in a requirements engineering process for software product lines

Abstract

Goal models can capture similarities and the variability of a Software Product Line (SPL), but they cannot describe the detailed behavior of the SPL functionality. Due to this limitation, a process called GS2SPL was defined to systematically obtain, from goal models, feature models and the specification of use case scenarios with variability. However, the variability and the configuration knowledge of the SPL are tangled in the scenarios description, jeopardizing the maintenance and reuse of this artifact. In order to handle with this problem, it was proposed a technique called MSVCM. It specifies the SPL variability and the configuration knowledge separately from the common behavior present in the scenarios, as well as it defines a process to configure the specification of a product. However, there is a lack of traceability between the MSVCM scenarios and the goals and quality that the stakeholder expects to achieve. Thus, this work proposes to obtain, systematically, the specification of MSVCM scenarios from goal models. Using goals in SPL allows a systematic derivation of the SPL requirements from these goals. This new approach is called GAS2SPL and it is illustrated by using the TaRGeT example.