Modeling Domain Variability in Requirements Engineering with Contexts

Various characteristics of the problem domain define the context in which the system is to operate and thus impact heavily on its requirements. However, most requirements specifications do not consider contextual properties and few modeling notations explicitly specify how domain variability affects the requirements. In this paper, we propose an approach for using contexts to model domain variability in goal models. We discuss the modeling of contexts, the specification of their effects on system goals, and the analysis of goal models with contextual variability. The approach is illustrated with a case study.

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