Communicating the variability of a software-product family to customers |
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| Authors: | Günter Halmans und Klaus Pohl |
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| Institution: | (1) Software Systems Engineering, University of Duisburg-Essen, Altendorfer Str. 97-101, 45117 Essen, Germany |
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| Abstract: | Variability is a central concept in software product family development. Variability empowers constructive reuse and facilitates the derivation of different, customer specific products from the product family. If many customer specific requirements can be realised by exploiting the product family variability, the reuse achieved is obviously high. If not, the reuse is low. It is thus important that the variability of the product family is adequately considered when eliciting requirements from the customer. In this paper we sketch the challenges for requirements engineering for product family applications. More precisely we elaborate on the need to communicate the variability of the product family to the customer. We differentiate between variability aspects which are essential for the customer and aspects which are more related to the technical realisation and need thus not be communicated to the customer. Motivated by the successful usage of use cases in single product development we propose use cases as communication medium for the product family variability. We discuss and illustrate which customer relevant variability aspects can be represented with use cases, and for which aspects use cases are not suitable. Moreover we propose extensions to use case diagrams to support an intuitive representation of customer relevant variability aspects.Received: 14 October 2002, Accepted: 8 January 2003, This work was partially funded by the CAFÉ project  From Concept to Application in System Family Engineering ; Eureka
! 2023 Programme, ITEA Project ip00004 (BMBF, Förderkennzeichen 01 IS 002 C) and the state Nord-Rhein-Westfalia. This paper is a significant extension of the paper Modellierung der Variabilität einer Produktfamilie, 15]. |
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| Keywords: | Variability Product family UML Use cases Requirements engineering |
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