Effective requirements elicitation in product line application engineering - an experiment

Context & Motivation: Developing new software systems based on a software product line (SPL) is still a time-consuming task and the benefits of using such an approach are often smaller than expected. One important reason for this are difficulties in systematically mapping customer requirements to characteristics of the SPL. Question/problem: Even though it has been recognized that the success of reuse strongly depends on how requirements are treated, it remains unclear how to perform this in an optimal way. Principal ideas/results: In this paper, we present a controlled experiment performed with 26 students that compared two requirements elicitation approaches when instantiating a given SPL. Contribution: Our findings indicate that a novel, problem-oriented requirements approach that explicitly integrates the reuse of SPL requirements into the elicitation of customer-specific requirements is more effective than a traditional SPL requirements approach, which distinguishes requirements reuse and additional elicitation customer-specific requirements.