Multi-view composition language for software product line requirements

Composition of requirements models in Software Product Line (SPL) development enables stakeholders to derive the requirements of target software products and, very important, to reason about them. Given the growing complexity of SPL development and the various stakeholders involved, their requirements are often specified from heterogeneous, partial views. However, existing requirements composition languages are very limited to generate specific requirements views for SPL products. They do not provide specialized composition rules for referencing and composing elements in recurring requirements models, such as use cases and activity models. This paper presents a multi-view composition language for SPL requirements, the Variability Modeling Language for Requirements (VML4RE). This language describes how requirements elements expressed in different models should be composed to generate a specific SPL product. The use of VML4RE is illustrated with UML-based requirements models defined for a home automation SPL case study. The language is evaluated with additional case studies from different application domains, such as mobile phones and sales management.