Detail

VML4RE – Variability Modelling Language for Requirements Engineering

Managing variability in Requirements Engineering is a key challenge in software-product-line engineering. An important part of variability management is the ability to express explicitly the relationships between variability models (expressing the variability in the problem space, for example using feature models) and other artefacts of the product line, for example, requirements models. Once these relations have been explicitly represented, they can be used for a number of purposes:
1. to automatically derive product instances based on product-configuration specifications
2. to generate trace-links between variability and requirements model elements
VML4RE is a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) that allows to express the relationships between variability elements and requirements model elements, such as use case and activity models. VML4RE implements transformation actions that are specific to the types of models used for describing the SPL providing a terminology already known to SPL engineers.
In summary, the goal of VML4RE is to support product derivation of requirements models in SPL by using a domain-specific language. It also supports trace link generation from features to requirements model elements, for further analysis.