Feature-driven requirement dependency analysis and high-level software design

In this paper, we introduce four kinds of dependency between features, namely refinement, constraint, influence and interaction, partly based on the observation of feature operationalization and assignment of responsibilities. Then, we explore three kinds of connection between these dependencies, that is, connections between refinement and constraint, between constraint and interaction, and between influence and interaction. We further show how to use the constraint dependencies to facilitate the customization-based reuse of requirements, and how to employ the result of feature dependency analysis to design high-level software architecture. A simple document editor and an email-client are used as running examples to illustrate the ideas introduced in this paper.

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