Feature Unweaving: Refactoring Software Requirements Specifications into Software Product Lines

The design of the variability of a software product line is crucial to its success and evolution. Meaningful variable features need to be elicited, analyzed, documented and validated when an existing software or reference system evolves into a software product line. These variable features are the main discriminators between individual products and they need to reflect the needs of a large variety of stakeholders adequately. In this paper we present a novel approach, called feature unweaving, that supports the identification and extraction of variable features from a given graphical software requirements model. We have extended our aspect-oriented software product line modeling tool [9] [10] such that it supports feature unweaving: it takes a set of model elements that a domain requirements engineer considers to constitute a variable feature and automatically refactors the model into a semantically equivalent one in which the model elements belonging to this feature are grouped into an...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: RE
• Authors: Reinhard Stoiber, Samuel Fricker, Michael Jehle, Martin Glinz
• Keywords: Model, RE 2010, Software Engineering, Software Product Line, Variable Features