1、Integrated Support for ProductConfiguration and Requirements Engineering in Product Derivation Rick Rabiser Deepak DhunganaChristian Doppler Laboratory for Automated Software EngineeringJohannes Kepler University Linz4040 Linz, Austriarabiserase.jku.atAbstract Deriving a product from a product line
2、means selecting and configuring existing reusable assets to meet a particular customers needs. The blue-sky scenario in product derivation is that all customer requirements can be satisfied by exploiting existing assets and their variability. The more realistic scenario, however, is that the custome
3、rs will have additional wishes and requirements that are not covered by the product line. We therefore need integrated support for both product configuration and requirements engineering tasks. New requirements captured during the sales process need to be related to existing assets. In this paper we
4、 present a tool-supported approach for integrated product configuration and requirements engineering. We illustrate the approach using a scenario developed in our research collaboration with a leading company in the steel plant building domain. 1. Introduction and Motivation The number and complexit
5、y of customer requirements imply serious challenges for developers of todays software-intensive systems who are facing tight budgets and schedules. It has been demonstrated that software product lines can deal with these challenges by fostering reuse in software development 20. A software product li
6、ne has been defined as “a set of software-intensive systems sharing a common, managed set of features that satisfy the specific needs of a particular market segment or mission and that are developed from a common set of core assets in a prescribed way” 7. Software product line engineering (SPLE) cov
7、ers processes for building, managing, and using software product lines, typically separating two key areas: domain engineering and application engineering 20. During domain engineering, the variability and commonalities of the product lines reusable core assets such as requirements, architectural el
8、ements, or solution components are captured in variability models 1. A significant body of research is available on modeling approaches and notations for this purpose 2, 20, 24. During application engineering, concrete products are derived from the product line by selecting, configuring, integrating
9、, and deploying the core assets. Compared to the vast amount of research results on building product lines, few approaches and tools are available for product derivation 15. Most notably, requirements engineering during product derivation, also referred to as application requirements engineering (AR
10、E), needs more attention 5, 14. Usually customers have additional wishes and requirements that cannot be fulfilled with the existing assets in the product line. For instance, legacy systems or COTS software have to be integrated which can imply new requirements resulting in additional development an
11、d the adaptation of existing assets. Customers and sales people need to be supported in understanding the variability provided by the product line. Both are involved in taking decisions required for product derivation during which sales people capture requirements articulated by the customers. Devel
12、opers and engineers perform the technical configuration of the core assets to actually derive the product. Integration of processes and people is critical: sales people are experts in selling and customizing products but are often unaware of the technical consequences of their decisions; engineers a
13、re experts in technical configuration but typically do not communicate directly with customers. Product configuration and requirements engineering in product derivation are challenging as these tasks involve modeling (e.g., utilizing variability models), requirements engineering (e.g., creating a di
14、alogue between the customer and the engineers), as well as usability issues (e.g., presenting complex product line features and their dependencies in an intuitive way). In this paper we describe an integrated approach for product configuration and requirements engineering called DOPLERUCon (UCon = U
15、ser-centered Configuration) and accompanying tools. The approach is embedded in our DOPLER (Decision-Oriented Product Line Engi-neering for effective Reuse) framework 9, 22. Our research is carried out in cooperation with Siemens VAI, the worlds leading company in the domain of engineering and plant
16、 building for the iron, steel, and aluminum industries.The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In Section 2 we present related work. In Section 3 we introduce our integrated approach for product configuration and requirements engineering. Section 4 describes tool-support for our approach. In Section 5 we illustrate our approach with a scenario from our industry partner. Section 6 rounds out the paper wit
