A vision for generic concern-oriented requirements reusere@21

Abstract

Reuse is a powerful tool for improving the productivity of software development. The paper puts forward arguments in favor of generic requirements reuse rooted in the vision that effectiveness requires a focus on coordinated composition of reusable artifacts across the whole software development life cycle. A survey of publications on requirements reuse from the International Requirements Engineering (RE) Conference series determines the research landscape in this area over the last twenty years, assessing the hypothesis that there is no or little research reported at RE about generic reuse of requirements models that spans the software development life cycle. The paper then outlines, for the RE community, a research agenda associated with the presented vision for such an approach to requirements reuse that builds on concern-orientation, i.e., the ability to modularize and compose important requirements concerns throughout the software development life cycle, and model-engineering principles. In addition, early research results are briefly presented that illustrate favorably the feasibility of such an approach.