From Stakeholder Goals to High-Variability Software Designs

Traditionally, software requirements consist of a list of desirable functions to be accommodated by the proposed software system. Through goal-oriented requirements engineering, stakeholder goals are analyzed into goal models that concisely define a space of alternative sets of functional requirements. We adopt this framework and propose a systematic generation of generic (high-variability) software designs that can accommodate ALL alternatives for the fulfillment of these stakeholder goals. In this paper, we enrich goal models with design-related annotations to generate three views of high-variability software design: feature models, statecharts, and component-connector models. Our process has been applied to an extensive study of the meeting scheduling problem, from which an initial highvariability design for the system-to-be is derived.