Concept analysis for product line requirements

Traditional methods characterize a software product line's requirements using either functional or quality criteria. This appears to be inadequate to assess modularity, detect interferences, and analyze trade-offs. We take advantage of both symmetric and asymmetric views of aspects, and perform formal concept analysis to examine the functional and quality requirements of an evolving product line. The resulting concept lattice provides a rich notion which allows remarkable insights into the modularity and interactions of requirements. We formulate a number of problems that aspectoriented product line requirements engineering should address, and present our solutions according to the concept lattice. We describe a case study applying our approach to analyze a mobile game product line's requirements, and review lessons learned. Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.1 [Software Engineering]: Requirements/Specifications; D.2.10 [Software Engineering]: Design--Representation Gene...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2009
• Where: AOSD
• Authors: Nan Niu, Steve M. Easterbrook
• Keywords: AOSD 2009, Formal Concept Analysis, Product Line, Requirements, Software Engineering