A comparison of goal-oriented approaches to model software product lines variability

Abstract

In the requirements engineering for software product lines (SPL), feature modeling is used to capture commonalities and variabilities in system families. However, it is a great challenge to establish the relationship among features in an application and stakeholders' goals. This makes it difficult to justify why a specific feature configuration is required, for example. On the other hand, goal-oriented requirements engineering provides a natural way to identify and specify how the stakeholders' interests and concerns might be addressed by the intended system. The strength of goal modeling to represent commonalities and variabilities in early stages of software product lines development has been recognized. As a result some goal-oriented approaches for modeling requirements variability in SPL have been recently proposed. In this paper we perform a comparison among existing goal-oriented techniques and then, we propose a new extension to the i* framework to capture common and variable requirements in software product lines. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.