Towards a Requirement-Based Approach to Support Early Decisions in Software Product Line Engineering

During the creation of a software product, the stakeholders have to take a lot of decisions. These decisions are related to the product scope, requirements priority, architecture assumptions, technological issues, etc. In the domain of Software Product Lines, many studies have dealt with decisions taken during the lifetime of the product, but a little attention has been given to the pre-project decisions. The aim of this paper is to propose a requirement-based framework that capitalizes on the specific products already derived from the product line, in order to support the benchmarking of the possible solutions that respond to a customer's needs, and to help the stakeholders of a product take decisions concerning the scope of the product and the requirements to implement.