Abstract
Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) and Software Product
Lines (SPL) are two software development paradigms that emphasize
reusing. The former reuse domain knowledge is represented as
models and model transformations for product development, and the
latter reuse domain knowledge is represented as core assets to
produce a family of products in a given domain. The adequate
combination of both paradigms can bring together important
advantages to the software development community. However, how
to manage requirements during a model-driven product line
development remains an open challenge. In particular, the
Requirements Engineering (RE) activity must deal with specific
properties such as variability and commonality for a whole family of
products. This paper presents a comparative study of eleven
approaches that perform a MDE strategy in the RE activity for SPL,
with the aim of identify ing current practices and research gaps. In
summary, most of the approaches are focused on the Domain
Engineering phase of the SPL development, giving less attention to
the Application Engineering phase. Moreover there is a lack of
coverage of the Scoping activity, which defines the SPL boundaries.
Several approaches apply some model transformations to obtain
architectural and application requirements artifacts. Regarding the
tool support for requirements specification and management, we
found that most of the approaches use only academic prototypes.
Regarding the validation of the approaches, the use of Case Studies
as a proof of concept was the most commonly used method; however,
there is a lack of well-defined case studies and empirical studies to
improve the proposals.