RED-PL, a method for deriving product requirements from a product line requirements model

Software product lines (SPL) modeling has proven to be an effective approach to reuse in software development. Several variability approaches were developed to plan requirements reuse, but only little of them actually address the issue of deriving product requirements. Indeed, while the modeling approaches sell on requirements reuse, the associated derivation techniques actually focus on deriving and reusing technical product data. This paper presents a method that intends to support requirements derivation. Its underlying principle is to take advantage of approaches made for reuse PL requirements and to complete them by a requirements development process by reuse for single products. The proposed approach matches users' product requirements with PL requirements models and derives a collection of requirements that is (i) consistent, and (ii) optimal with respect to users' priorities and company's constraints. The proposed methodological process was validated in an industrial setting by considering the requirement engineering phase of a product line of blood analyzers.