Model-Driven Derivation of Domain Functional Requirements from Use Cases

Domain analysis is essential to core assets development in software product line engineering. Most existing approaches, however, depend on domain experts ’ experience to analyze the commonality and variability of systems in a domain, which remains a manual and intensive process. This paper addresses the issue by proposing a model-driven approach to automating the domain requirements derivation process. The paper focuses on the match between the use cases of existing individual products and the domain functional requirements of a product line. By introducing a set of linguistic description dimensions to differentiate the sub-variations in a use case, the use case template is extended to model variability. To this end, a transformation process is formulated to sustain and deduce the information in use cases, and to match it to domain functional requirements. This paper also presents a prototype which implements the derivation as a model transformation described in a graphical model transformation language MOLA. This approach complements existing domain analysis techniques with less manual operation cost and more efficiency by automating the domain functional requirements development