DSSR: Support for Domain Specific Software Requirements

Reusable software requiremetns offer significant potential for rapidly producing high quality software systems within many application domains. This is particularly the case in application domains where many variations of similar systems are generated. Command and control systems, such as those in CECOM, are specially good examples. Reusable requirements need to have the following properties. They must use standard domain-oriented vocabularies, they must identify the common requirements to all systems in the family, and they must identify the portions of the requirements that vary between different system variations. In addition those variations must include rationale for choosing them over the other alternatives, including tradeoff and risk assessment information. Such requirements should be catalogued using techniques such as faceted classification, be composable, and be easily estended. This a proposal to assess the current state of requirements reusability and define a requirements methodology and set of tools that foster requirements reuse. The proposed requirements method will stress techniques for constructing and reusing requirements, such as domain analysis, OOA, and issue-based techniques. As part of the Phase I objectives, we will also define an architecture for an environment to support the methodology and promote automated requirements reuse.