DECIMAL: A requirements engineering tool for product families

Abstract

<p>Today, many software organizations are utilizing product families as a way of improving productivity, improving quality and reducing development time. When a new member is added to a product family, there must be a way to verify whether the new member's specific requirements are met within the reuse constraints of its product family. The contribution of this paper is to demonstrate such a verification process by describing a requirements engineering tool called DECIMAL. DECIMAL is an interactive, automated, GUI driven verification tool that automatically checks for completeness (checking to see if all commonalities are satisfied) and consistency (checking to see if dependencies between variabilities are satisfied) of the new member's requirements with the product family's requirements. DECIMAL also checks that variabilities are within the range and data type specified for the product family. The approach is to perform the verification using a database as the underlying analysis engine. A pilot study of a virtual reality device driver product family is also described which investigates the feasibility of this approach by evaluating the tool.</p>