Systematic requirements recycling

Software organizations are looking towards large-scale reuse as a way of improving productivity, raising quality, and reducing delivery timescales. A systematic requirements reuse process is particularly desirable for organizations engaged in domain-specific software development where many similar applications are developed and where the level of reuse is potentially very high. In industry, requirements reuse is typically performed ad-hoc. Non-systematic reuse between requirements documents of product variants is a major source of requirements defects. One reason for these problems is that it is difficult to identify requirements that can potentially be reused. In addition, often not all requirements related to a reused requirement are copied. This report describes existing approaches for systematic requirements' reuse. Based on the characteristics of these approaches, a systematic requirements' reuse approach is presented that is tailored to the specific development situation of DaimlerChrysler. It is based on a combination of abstraction (in terms of a template) and traceability (between requirements). The main features of this approach are the use of conceptual models to determine relationships necessary for correct reuse and the focus on minimizing link setting. This approach can also be used to develop abstraction and traceability guidelines tailored to other application domains and traceability goals, such as change or project management. In addition, this report describes how a requirements management tool, such as DOORS, can support this systematic recycling process