Modelling Requirements to Support Testing of Product Lines

The trend towards constantly growing numbers of product variants and features in industry makes the improvement of analysis and specification techniques a key efficiency enabler. The development of a single generic functional specification applicable to a whole product family can help to save costs and time to market significantly. However, the introduction of a product-line approach into a system manufacturer's electronics development process is a challenging task, prone to human error, with the risk of spreading a single fault across a whole platform of product variants. In this contribution, a combined approach on variant-management and model-based requirements analysis and validation is presented. The approach, process and tool presented are generally applicable to functional requirements analysis and specification, since informal specifications or only an abstract idea of the required function are demanded as an input. It has been experienced in several industrial projects that the presented approach may help to reduce redundancies and inconsistencies and as a consequence it may ease and improve subsequent analysis, design and testing activities. Furthermore, the application of the presented variant management approach may benefit from model-based specifications, due to their improved analysability and changeability. In this contribution we present our experiences and results using model-based and variant-management concepts for requirements specification to support system testing. Additionally, we present an extension to integrate testing into the variant-management concept. The presented approach and process are supported by the MERAN tool-suite, which has been developed as an add-in to IBM RationalDOORS.