A Framework for Managing Requirements of Software Product Lines

An emerging problem in the Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) is the need for integral management of planned reuse. In SPLE there are two instances where managing requirements gains relevance. The first one arises during the construction of SPLs based on legacy software or previously developed SPLs. The second one appears when instantiating products from the SPL platform, where instantiating variability meets the custom requirements of each product. The objective of this paper is to define a framework that allows management of requirements using Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval techniques, to structure, clean, index and find reusable functionalities according to those requirements. This framework is built in a way that allows the combination of such techniques to evaluate the best combinations for finding the correct functionalities in each SPL domain.