A Feature Oriented Approach to Mapping from Domain Requirements to Product Line Architecture

Architecture is one of important parts in software product line, and architecture comes from domain requirements. Individual requirements are seldom independent of each other, but various kinds of dependency exist among them. Software product line architecture determines reusable assets across a domain by exploring domain requirements commonality and variability, so domain requirements dependencies have very strong influence on product line architecture. A feature is a set of tight-related requirements from stakeholders' viewpoints and feature dependencies reflect requirements dependencies. Among those existing feature oriented approaches to managing requirements dependencies in software product lines, few approaches deal with mapping from requirements to product line architecture. In order to decrease the inconsistencies between assets and increase the reuse in a product line, mapping rules from requirements to features and mapping rules from features to architecture are developed based on a feature dependencies classification defined in another paper. It is also validated whether consistencies between product assets are coincident with those between requirements based on mapping rules. Following these mapping rules, consistent assets are generated from consistent requirements, thus reducing time consuming work on consistent analysis of assets, and supporting easy generation of product line architecture from domain requirements. A case study for spot and future transaction domain is described to illustrate and validate the approach.