ReDSeeDS: Requirements Driven Software Development System

This paper presents a tool suite which enables requirementsdriven software reuse. The suite is built around requirements models that are transformed into design and code thus forming so-called ‘software cases’. These requirements models can be compared for software case retrieval and reuse. 1 Motivation and related work Effective reuse of design and code artifacts is associated with mechanisms for asset indexing. Normally, additional indexing information has to be added to the reuse repository in a manual process. Some approaches allow for generating the indexes based on the information contained in the meta-model which defines the structure of the assets (see [1]). In other approaches, semantic information is attached to the assets to enable case-based retrieval (see [2]). In many product line approaches, a family of systems is indexed through requirements where the problem domain plays crucial role (see [3] for an interesting insight). The fundamental problem with current requirements-based indexing approaches is that requirements lack precision. This prevents from automatic indexing and retrieval based on such indexes. In this work we follow the use-case-based path started by Jacobson et al. in [4]. We make the use cases precise as introduced in [5] at the same time offering tools that enable formulating requirements with asset indexing potential. This can be achieved by treating requirements as models and applying modern model transformation techniques. This way we address the problems with wider adoption of software reuse (see [6]) consisting mainly in the existence of investment barriers (effort necessary to prepare assets for reuse and then to retrieve them). The presented tool suite enables software development scenarios where requirements specifications (problem statements) automatically form indexes to design and code artifacts (problem solutions) at a very detailed level thus forming so-called ‘software cases’ ready for comparison and reuse. 2 ReDSeeDS tool mechanisms Requirements based reuse has been accomplished through building of a tool called ReDSeeDS Engine in the context of the ReDSeeDS (www.redseeds.eu) Project. The tool allows for the following reuse scenario.