A Systems Approach to Product Line Requirements Reuse

Product line engineering has become the main method for achieving systematic software reuse. Embracing requirements in a product line's asset base enhances the effectiveness of reuse as engineers can work on the abstractions closer to the domain's initial concepts. Conventional proactive approaches to product line engineering cause excessive overhead when codifying the assets. In this paper, we propose a systems-oriented approach to extracting functional requirements profiles. The validated extraction constructs are amenable to semantic case analysis and orthogonal variability modeling, so as to uncover the variation structure and constraints. To evaluate our approach, we present an experiment to quantify the extraction overhead and effectiveness and a case study to assess our approach's usefulness. The results show that our automatic support offers an order-of-magnitude saving over the manual extraction effort without significantly compromising quality and that our approach receives a positive adoption rate by systems engineers.