A CASE-STUDY OF REQUIREMENTS REUSE THROUGH PRODUCT FAMILIES

Increasingly, software organisations are looking towards large-scale r euse as a way of improving productivity, raising quality and reducing delivery timescales. Many in the reuse community have suggested notion s of product-line development and domain engineering life-cycles. Achi eving these in practice, however, requires a systematic process for '' early'' reuse (requirements reuse) as well as late reuse (code reuse). This paper discusses pratical experience of early reuse. We describe FORE (Family Of REquirements), an approach that we have developed in o ur work in the domain of aircraft engine control systems. The FORE app roach concentrates on the definition of a generic product concept and the formalisation of its requirements. We describe the FORE approach i n general terms, and then show how it has been applied in an industria l case-study. We make an initial evaluation of the FORE approach (and early reuse in general) in terms of how it has changed an existing req uirements engineering process. We compare the FORE approach to related work in early reuse, and draw some conclusions about how the approach may scale to other problems.