Variation-Oriented Requirements Analysis (VORA)

One approach to improve the reusability of business process-based solutions is to represent the business process as a combination of autonomous services via a service-oriented architecture (SOA) centric style. Such an approach would represent variations at service and business process level in terms of two key constructs - variation points (the placeholders in the solution model where variations can be introduced) and variation features (the actual variations that can be introduced at a subset of the listed variation points for that solution). One key research issue that has arisen out of the VOE project is how to actually identify and subsequently justify these variation points and variation features based on changed requirements. In this paper we propose our approach called Variation- Oriented Requirements Analysis (VORA) that addresses this issue. VORA is based on a traceability model that maps requirements to use cases, sequence diagrams, business processes and finally service specifications. We show how this mapping can also be used to (semi-) automatically map requirement changes down to variation points and variation features at service and business process level. We also demonstrate VORA via a simple yet realistic running example.