Consistency management of product line requirements

Contemporary software engineering utilizes product lines for reducing time to market and development cost of a single product variant, for improving quality of the products, and for creating better estimations of the development process. Most product line development processes rely on performing a domain analysis to find out commonalities among proposed family members and to estimate how they will vary. On the other hand, most requirements engineering methods focus on the specification of a single system. Despite active research efforts to close this gap there is still no effective method that allows product specifications in arbitrary, levels of detail for a hierarchical product family. Especially, it is not possible to combine different specification mechanisms to produce a complete family specification. In this paper, we approach these problems by presenting a method that allows system specifications both in the product line variant as well as the product family level. This exposes many problems in managing consistency between different methods to specify families of systems. To achieve this, our method offers deriving consistency management support between different specification levels and among family variants.