A flexible requirements analysis approach for software product lines

Product Line Engineering (PLE) promotes the development of applications by reusing a set of software assets belonging to a given domain. Important research efforts have been devoted to the description of commonalties and variabilities among these assets yielding requirements engineering techniques such as feature modeling or use case variants. However, current product derivation techniques, which strive to automate the derivation process, are inflexible in that they fail to accommodate products that represent only a minor deviation from the original product line. Furthermore, PLE methodologies do not provide precise support to assist product derivation in such cases. In this paper, we address flexibility issues by introducing an analysis model, based on UML, OCL and use cases, that implicitly defines define product line variabilities and boundaries by means of constraints forbidding undesired products. Then, in order to reuse domain assets in a coherent manner, an imperative model transformation mechanism is devised. We illustrate this approach through a simple example.