scone – A Requirements Management Tool for the Specification and Variability-Based Analysis of Product Lines

Abstract

Nowadays, industrial products as well as software applications are expected to be tailored to the user’s needs in an increasingly distinct manner. This often makes it necessary to design a vast number of customized variants, which leads to complex and error prone analysis and development processes. Generally, requirements engineering is considered to be one of the most significant activities in software and system development. Variant management has proven to play an important role in handling the complexity arising from mass-customization of products. However, there are only a few, often rather complex-to-use, applications which allow adding variance information directly to requirements. Especially in case of small and medium sized enterprises, approaches to meet this challenge often result in isolated solutions that are not driven by state-of-the-art analysis methods and do not cope with future requirements. This paper introduces a lightweight requirements management tool called scone, which will be embedded into an overall variability management methodology. scone enables the user to create and manage requirement specifications and augment them with variability information. Based on this specification, the requirements can be analyzed in a formal way with respect to their variability using the variability management tool Glencoe. scone was created as a single-page web application to eliminate the need for installation and allow it to run on many devices, while offering the experience of working with a native application, rather than a website. Both tools are designed to provide a proof of concept for the seamless integration of variability information within a system development process as well as to show how variability can be handled in an easy-to-use way from the very beginning within this process.