Requirements management for product lines: Extending professional tools

The key idea of software product lines is the integrated development of a set of products, exploiting commonalities and variabilities among the products to achieve high levels of reuse. The commercial potential of this approach has already been demonstrated in numerous case studies. However, while requirements management tools are already widespread, the range of professional tool support for product line development is still very poor. In this paper we analyze the question whether and how existing requirement management tools can be seamlessly extended to product line development. We present a general approach, which has been prototyped based on the DOORS requirements management tool and leads to the REMAP-tool extension.