Introduction to Product Line Requirements Engineering Brian Berenbach Siemens Corporate Research, Inc.
[email protected] Abstract Requirements elicitation and management has become ever more important as products become more complex and time to market is shortened and the definitions of product lines has significantly increased project complexity. Outsourcing has added a new dimension to requirements management, exacerbating problems associated with transitioning from analysis to design. This half day tutorial will provide an introduction to product line requirements engineering from the perspective of project and product management: how it impacts project managers, quality assurance personnel, requirements analysts, developers and testers. Topics covered will include product line requirements, feature modeling, CMMI compliant requirements management and requirements analysis processes (both UML and text based). Business analysts who are interested in using UML for modeling will also find the course interesting. No formal knowledge of programming is required. developers and testers.
1. Introduction Organizational structures and requirements management and elicitation processes change when product line requirements are defined. The necessary changes are typically not well understood, but may significantly impact project outcomes. Furthermore, the instructor has observed projects where product lines were being created but the staff was unaware of the differences between a product and a product line!
2. Product Feature Definition Product lines, unlike individual products, have feature variation. Not all features will be in all products in the product line. Sales and marketing organizations need to clearly communicate not only the features of the products being developed, but how they vary from product to product. Release planning is also complicated by feature dependencies, e.g. feature “B” cannot be in a product release unless feature “A” is also in the release. This tutorial will instruct in the creation of feature models that can, in conjunction with market data (.e.g. minimal marketable features) be leveraged for test planning and release planning.
3. Requirements Management
10th International Software Product Line Conference (SPLC'06) 0-7695-2599-7/06 $20.00 © 2006
Requirements management processes are more complex when considering product lines vs. managing change for individual products. Impact analysis requires traceability, and traces can be difficult to maintain in a product line environment.
4. Requirements Elicitation Product line elicitation techniques, including traditional text requirement specifications and UML modeling concepts are discussed in the tutorial. The relationship between a feature model and traditional use case model is described, and best practices for requirements development are presented.
5. Organizational Issues Product line requirements engineering requires significant organizational changes. For example, the role of the product manager may change, and/or the role of product line manager may be introduced. Certain types of sales/marketing pressure may be applied to introduce unique or baroque features to meet individual stakeholder needs. Techniques for effectively managing product lines in such an environment will be provided.
6. References [1] Clements, P. and Northrup L., Software Product Lines, Addison-Wesley, 2001. [2] Pohl, K., Böckle, G., van der Linden, F., Software
Product Line Engineering - Foundations, Principles, and Techniques, Springer, 2005. [3] Clements, P. and Northrop, L., Software Product Lines: Practices and Patterns, Addison-Wesley, 2000. [4] Gomaa H., Designing Software Product Lines with UML – From Use Cases to Pattern-Based Software Architectures, Addison-Wesley (2004).
7. About the instructor Brian Berenbach is currently manager of the requirements engineering competency center at Siemens Corporate Research. Mr. Berenbach has extensive experience in requirements and product line requirements elicitation and management. He also has several years experience prior to joining Siemens as a software product line manager.
