Speakers:
Hermann Kaindl (TU Wien, Austria)
Mike Mannion (Glasgow Caledonian University, UK)

Several socio-economic trends, such as people’s demands for personalized software-intensive products, are generating unparalleled increases in the volume, variety, velocity and complexity of software-intensive products. This is placing considerable strain on software designers. Part of the solution is to make it easier to explore stakeholder needs by showcasing the range of similarity and variability between the products in a product line. A technical challenge is to create product development processes that include a systematic capability to manage the identification, selection and deployment of reusable requirements. Requirements reuse is not straightforward.
This tutorial presents and compares two different requirements reuse approaches, one in the context of product line engineering, the other in the context of case-based reasoning (invented in Artificial Intelligence). Both approaches have different key properties and trade-offs between the costs of making software artefacts reusable and the benefits of reusing them. To aid large-scale development we have proposed a FeatureSimilarity Model, which draws on both approaches to facilitate discovering requirements relationships using similarity metrics. Understanding the similarities and differences between products can aid suppliers assess whether there is value in new product development proposals, and customers assess whether there is value in one product over another concerning their needs.