Constructing Traceability between Features and Requirements for Software Product Line Engineering

Software Product Line Engineering organizes the commonality and the variability of domain feature model in order to achieve large-scale software reuse. Although there are a variety of approaches to the construction of domain feature models, they are however difficult to locate inconsistency caused by frequent changes occurring in the process of evolution. This paper presents a novel approach to the construction of domain feature model and its trace ability with corresponding requirements. It first constructs a set of feature models for individual applications within same domain and their trace ability to corresponding application requirements. Then, it merges all application feature models to form the domain feature model and constructs the trace ability between features in different models. It finally extracts the domain requirements and the trace ability between domain requirements and domain features. The case of software product line for labor market monitoring applications verifies this new approach, and shows that it can not only construct domain feature model automatically and effectively, but also help locate affected requirements while features change or vice versa.