An Approach for Requirements Engineering for Software Library-Components and Patterns to be Reused in and across Product Lines

Abstract

In the development of product lines one of the challenges is to exploit commonalities among products such that development cost is reduced. For software, this implies to identify parts that are sufficiently similar to define library-components or patterns for reuse. The detailed definition of scope, responsibilities and interfaces for library-components and patterns is part of their design process, which makes requirements engineering different for them. The paper presents a method to determine a set of requirements that forms a suitable starting point for the design. This assures that the component or pattern to be designed fits well to all systems under consideration. Established design principles like abstraction or parameterization are applied to requirement engineering and management. The method has been successfully applied in several automotive cross-product-line development projects.