Generating Configuration Models from Requirements to Assist in Product Management : Dependency Engine and its Performance Assessment

Requirements engineering is often, especially in the context of major open source software projects, performed with issue tracking systems such as Jira or Bugzilla. Issues include requirements expressed as bug reports, feature requests, etc. Such systems are at their best at managing individual requirements life-cycle. The management of dependencies between issues and holistic analysis of the whole product or a release plan is usually scantly supported. Feature modeling is an established way to represent dependencies between individual features, especially in the context of Software Product Lines — well-researched feature model analysis and configuration techniques exist. We developed a proof-of-concept dependency engine for holistically managing requirements. It is based on automatically mapping requirements and their dependencies into a variant of feature models, enabling utilization of existing research. The feature models are further mapped into a constraint satisfaction problem. The user can experiment with different configurations of requirements. The system maintains the consistency of dependencies and resource constraints. To evaluate the feasibility of the system, we measure the performance of the system both with some real and generated requirements. Despite some remaining performance issues, it seems that the approach can scale into managing the requirements of large software projects.Peer reviewe