Detecting Feature Duplication in Natural Language Specifications when Evolving Software Product Lines

Software product lines are dynamic systems that need to evolve continuously to meet new customer requirements. This evolution impacts both the core platform of the product line and its derived products. For several reasons, the most common way to express requirements by customers is natural language. However, the experience has shown that this communication channel does not give the possibility to detect system defects such as inconsistency and duplication. The objective of this paper is to propose a method to transform textual requirements into the XML format used by some Feature-oriented software development tools, in order to facilitate the detection of features duplication.