The following technical report is available from http://aib.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/:
Horst Lichter, Thomas von der Maßen, Thomas Weiler Modelling Requirements and Architectures for Software Product Lines 2002-05
Abstract: The development of software product lines has become a new and promising field in software development in the last few years. Market asks for faster development of new software products which also must be cheap and of high quality. Here software product line engineering offers software companies the possibility to adress this market needs by also reducing the development costs.
Software product line engineering is based on the domain engineering which provides a basis of core assets (also called platform), which in turn can be reused by thereon based applications in the application engineering. Thereby it is essential to model the variability which occurs among different applications derived from the platform.
Within requirements engineering the specification of requirements only in natural language isn't adequate to obtain a most possible complete and consistent description of requirements. Because existing notations aren't adequat for modeling requirements for software product lines a new approach is required.
Also architecture modeling for software product lines requires new concepts for modeling the common and variable parts of a software product line. Therefore software architectures for software product lines can be described by means of feature components which represent a specific characteristic of the system to be modeled.
This report adresses these problems and offers new concepts for their solution.