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Feature-driven requirement dependency analysis and high-level software design

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Abstract

In this paper, we introduce four kinds of dependency between features, namely refinement, constraint, influence and interaction, partly based on the observation of feature operationalization and assignment of responsibilities. Then, we explore three kinds of connection between these dependencies, that is, connections between refinement and constraint, between constraint and interaction, and between influence and interaction. We further show how to use the constraint dependencies to facilitate the customization-based reuse of requirements, and how to employ the result of feature dependency analysis to design high-level software architecture. A simple document editor and an email-client are used as running examples to illustrate the ideas introduced in this paper.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Grand Fundamental Research 973 Program of China under Grant no. 2002CB312003, the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant no.60233010, 60125206, and 90412011, and the Beijing Natural Science Foundation under Grant no. 4052018.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Software, School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, China

    Wei Zhang, Hong Mei & Haiyan Zhao

Authors
  1. Wei Zhang
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  2. Hong Mei
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  3. Haiyan Zhao
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Hong Mei.

Appendices

Appendix 1. Detecting anomalies

figure a

Appendix 2. Detecting inconsistency of constraints

figure b

Appendix 3. Detecting inconsistency of binding resolutions

figure c

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Zhang, W., Mei, H. & Zhao, H. Feature-driven requirement dependency analysis and high-level software design. Requirements Eng 11, 205–220 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-006-0033-x

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