An Introduction to Global Product Line Requirements Engineering

Empirical studies have shown that the use of a product line approach to software development can result in shorter time to market and improved productivity. Outsourcing and distributed development has added a new dimension to product management, exacerbating problems associated with transitioning from marketing studies to product definition to analysis and design. Communication problems can arise when requirements for products are captured on a regional or international basis. This half day tutorial provides an introduction to global product line requirements engineering from the perspective of project and product management. Topics covered include geographically distributed product lines including organizational and technical issues of globalization, distributed requirements elicitation, feature modeling, the role of the product line manager, and the use of meta-models to define global/distributed processes.