Towards a Computer-Aided Problem-Oriented Variability Requirements Engineering Method

In theory, software product lines are planned in advance, using established engineering methods. However, there are cases where commonalities and variabilities between several systems are only discovered after they have been developed individually as single systems. In retrospect, this leads to the hindsight that these systems should have been developed as a software product line from the beginning to reduce costs and effort. To cope with the challenge of detecting variability early on, we propose the PREVISE method, covering domain and application engineering. Domain engineering is concerned with exploring the variability caused by entities in the environment of the software and the variability in functional and quality requirements. In application engineering, the configuration for a concrete product is selected, and subsequently, a requirement model for a concrete product is derived.