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Reuse of requirements reduced time to market at one industrial shop: a case study

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Abstract

Many a computer-based system (CBS) developed in one division of the Israel Aerospace Industries, is a derivation of formerly delivered CBSs. Sometimes, a CBS that was developed over decades needs to be redesigned for a new customer or for new technology. In addition, the requirements management process in the division has to deal with an extensive system of systems, a matrix organizational structure, and many subcontractors in order to develop any fully operational CBS. It has become obvious that any generic building block in any product developed by any project in a project family stands a chance to be reused to build new products in other projects of the same project family. Moreover, this reuse is best if it begins with the consideration of the reuse of a requirements specification of the building block, in order to save the time and money of the block’s development. The reused artifact can be the contract description of the building block, from very early in the lifecycle. Alternatively, the reused artifact can be detailed hardware and software specifications for the building block, from later in the lifecycle. With which specification reuse begins depends on the purpose of the reuse. No matter when a reuse began, it led to some significant reduction in the product’s time to market, i.e., its time to delivery. This paper is a case study of several instances in an industrial setting of building-block reuse within a large-scale system being developed in the division. It reports how these reuses were discovered and carried out. Among the contributions of this paper is a description of the division’s multilevel requirements hierarchy that is based on the multilevel architecture of the CBS to be developed. Also contributed the division’s idea of project-family-based reuse, as opposed to product-line-based reuse. The paper shows how basing reuse on a project family made proactive reuse possible. The paper then analyzes data from the division’s requirements-management tool about these reuses to assess the impact of requirements reuse on time to market. Finally, it confirms this quantitative assessment by a qualitative assessment garnered from quotations gathered from interviews of four key people two-and-a-half years after the end of the period of the case study.

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Notes

  1. Even though the studied organization develops only bespoke CBSs and does not develop CBSs for the mass market, the department that responds to requests for proposals from external potential customers is called the “Marketing Department”. Thus, what this department is doing are marketing and marketing analysis. Consequently, in the organization, a CBS’s time to delivery is called the CBS’s “time to market”. This paper uses this terminology when it talks about time to delivery.

  2. In each quotation, the sans-seriffed items (the sans-seriffing not part of the original quotation) are those that are considered parts of RM.

  3. These data are confidential, and their actual values cannot be shown here.

  4. The one-concept-per-module calls to mind ontological approaches to RE [8, 50], which are just not used at MMD.

  5. The reuse rate of a requirements specification is the ratio between the number of existing requirements in the artifact reused from previous releases and the total number of requirements in the artifact.

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the anonymous interviewees.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software Engineering, Afeka—Tel Aviv Academic College of Engineering, Tel Aviv, 69107, Israel

    Leah Goldin

  2. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

    Daniel M. Berry

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  1. Leah Goldin
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Correspondence to Daniel M. Berry.

Additional information

This paper is an enhancement of a paper titled “Reuse of Requirements Reduces Time to Market” [1]. The conference paper has been extended by more detailed explanations of the company’s project structure, of the studied project, of the data, and by lessons learned from interviews of key personnel.

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Goldin, L., Berry, D.M. Reuse of requirements reduced time to market at one industrial shop: a case study. Requirements Eng 20, 23–44 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-013-0182-7

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