The discipline of requirements engineering and management has matured significantly during the past few years. As a result of this maturation, a considerable number of requirements engineering frameworks has become available that aim at describing requirements concepts and guiding requirements practice in a detailed and comprehensive manner. At the same time, software product line development spreads across wide areas of the industry, imposing new challenges on requirements engineering.
The working group “Requirements Engineering Frameworks and Product Lines” aims at surveying the major requirements engineering frameworks (RE frameworks), assessing their relevance from an industrial point of view, and evaluating their applicability to product line development. Ultimatively, the result should help practitioners seeking for guidance in their RE approach to select the right framework for their respective environment.
The term RE framework denotes generic models that describe and structure requirements-related processes, artefacts, organizations and roles, or combinations of those. The objective of RE frameworks is to formulate principles and provide points of reference that guide the understanding and practice of requirements engineering and management. Examples are the Requirements Abstraction Model (RAM) (Wohlin and Gorschek, 2006), the Requirements Engineering Reference Model (REM) (Geisberger et al., 2006), the requirements discipline of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) (Kroll and Kruchten, 2003), the Volere requirements knowledge model (Robertson and Robertson, 2005), and IEEE Standard 830-1998 on Software Requirements Specifications.
RE frameworks are usually defined on a generic level, aiming for applicability to every kind of software development. However, there are also frameworks specific for a certain business domain or a specific company environment. The working group will consider both generic and specific frameworks.
Software product lines (SPL) are 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 (Clements and Northrop, 2002). During recent years, software product line development has become increasingly relevant within industry. Many software organizations transform their traditional one-at-a-time product development into product lines. Along this transformation, the organizations face several challenges, many of which in the domain of requirements engineering and management.
- P. Clements and L. Northrop. Software product lines: Practices and Patterns. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, 2002.
- E. Geisberger, M. Broy, B. Berenbach, J. Kazmeier, D. Paulish, and A. Rudorfer. Requirements Engineering Reference Model (REM). Technische Universität München, Technical Report TUM-I0618, 2006.
- T. Gorschek and C. Wohlin. Requirements Abstraction Model. Requirements Engineering Journal, vol. 11, 2006, pp. 79-101.
- IEEE Computer Society. IEEE recommended practice for software requirements specifications. IEEE Standard 830-1998, IEEE CS, 1998.
- P. Kroll and Ph. Kruchten. The Rational Unified Process made easy: A practicioner’s guide to the RUP. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, 2003.
- S. Robertson and J. Robertson. Requirements-led project management. Addison-Wesley, Boston, MA, 2005.
