Coherent Integration of Variability Mechanisms at the Requirements Elicitation and Analysis Levels

Early phases of product line development can be separated in requirement elicitation and analysis. The former provides an abstract and informal description of the product line, while the latter provides a technical specification as precise and as complete as possible. The major problems we face are to define the con- tent of each phase for optimal development cycle and to provide consistency between those phases. This paper aims at integrating product line variability mechanisms between requirements elicitation and analysis levels. First, we pre- sent a requirements elicitation template based on use case variants. Then, product analysis phase is done using a generative mechanism starting from the core analysis assets and specifying the variation covered by the use case variants. These mechanisms are coherently related by means of consistency rules and the same approach is employed to integrate feature models with the analysis phase. Finally elements for variability integration reasoning are derived on the basis of these rules.