TY - JOUR
T1 - Evaluating scenario-based SPL requirements approaches
T2 - The case for modularity, stability and expressiveness
AU - Alférez, Mauricio
AU - Bonifacio, Rodrigo
AU - Teixeira, Leopoldo
AU - Accioly, Paola
AU - Kulesza, Uira
AU - Moreira, Ana Maria Diniz
AU - Júnior, João Baptista da Silva Araújo
AU - Borba, Paulo
N1 - This work was partially supported by the Centro de Informatica e Tecnologias de Informacao (CITI) - Portugal, the European Project AMPLE - contract IST-33710, the grant SFRH/BD/46194/2008 of Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia - Portugal, and the National Institute of Science and Technology for Software Engineering (INES) - CNPq under grants 573964/2008-4 and CNPQ 560256/2010-8.
PY - 2014/10/12
Y1 - 2014/10/12
N2 - Software product lines (SPL) provide support for productivity gains through systematic reuse. Among the various quality attributes supporting these goals, modularity, stability and expressiveness of feature specifications, their composition and configuration knowledge emerge as strategic values in modern software development paradigms. This paper presents a metric-based evaluation aiming at assessing how well the chosen qualities are supported by scenario-based SPL requirements approaches. The selected approaches for this study span from type of notation (textual or graphical based), style to support variability (annotation or composition based), and specification expressiveness. They are compared using the metrics developed in a set of releases from an exemplar case study. Our major findings indicate that composition-based approaches have greater potential to support modularity and stability, and that quantification mechanisms simplify and increase expressiveness of configuration knowledge and composition specifications.
AB - Software product lines (SPL) provide support for productivity gains through systematic reuse. Among the various quality attributes supporting these goals, modularity, stability and expressiveness of feature specifications, their composition and configuration knowledge emerge as strategic values in modern software development paradigms. This paper presents a metric-based evaluation aiming at assessing how well the chosen qualities are supported by scenario-based SPL requirements approaches. The selected approaches for this study span from type of notation (textual or graphical based), style to support variability (annotation or composition based), and specification expressiveness. They are compared using the metrics developed in a set of releases from an exemplar case study. Our major findings indicate that composition-based approaches have greater potential to support modularity and stability, and that quantification mechanisms simplify and increase expressiveness of configuration knowledge and composition specifications.
KW - Requirements specification
KW - Software product lines
KW - Use scenarios
KW - Variability modeling
U2 - 10.1007/s00766-013-0184-5
DO - 10.1007/s00766-013-0184-5
M3 - Article
SN - 0947-3602
VL - 19
SP - 355
EP - 376
JO - Requirements Engineering
JF - Requirements Engineering
IS - 4(SI)
ER -