Providing Software Product Line Knowledge to Requirements Engineers – A Template for Elicitation Instructions

[Context & Motivation]

Developing new software systems based on a software product line (SPL) in so-called application engineering (AE) projects is still a time-consuming and expensive task. Especially when a large number of customer-specific requirements exists, there is still no systematic support for efficiently aligning these non-anticipated requirements with SPL characteristics early on.

[Question/problem]

In order to improve this process significantly, sound knowledge about an SPL must be available when guiding the requirements elicitation during AE. Thus, an appropriate reflection of SPL characteristics in process-supporting artifacts is indispensable for actually supporting a requirements engineer in this task.

[Principal ideas/results]

In this paper, a validated template for elicitation instructions that aims at providing a requirements engineer with knowledge about an underlying SPL in an appropriate manner is presented. This template consists of predefined text blocks and algorithms that explain how SPL-relevant product and process knowledge can be systematically reflected into capability-aware elicitation instructions.

[Contribution]

By using such elicitation instructions, requirements engineers are enabled to elicit requirements in an AE project more effectively.