A systematic review of the use of requirements engineering techniques in model-driven development

Model-Driven Development (MDD) emphasizes the use of models at a higher abstraction level in the software development process and argues in favor of automation via model execution, transformation, and code generation. However, one current challenge is how to manage requirements during this process whilst simultaneously stressing the benefits of automation. This paper presents a systematic review of the current use of requirements engineering techniques in MDD processes and their actual automation level. 72 papers from the last decade have been reviewed from an initial set of 884 papers. The results show that although MDD techniques are used to a great extent in platform-independent models, platform-specific models, and at code level, at the requirements level most MDD approaches use only partially defined requirements models or even natural language. We additionally identify several research gaps such as a need for more efforts to explicitly deal with requirements traceability and the provision of better tool support.