Mapping Requirements to Reusable Components Using Design Spaces

*This research was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft as part of the Special Research Project 501. Abstract A consistent implementation of component-based reuse bears several implications for the design of the software development process. For instance, requirements engineering has to be tailored to particularly elicit information necessary for selecting and configuring appropriate components. Besides sketching our approach to component-based system development, this paper shows how Design Spaces can be applied to actively support reuseoriented activities. Design Spaces allow to uniformly describe requirements on and properties of software artefacts, as well as correlations between specific properties. As a consequence, they are well suited to guide the requirements capturing towards the properties of existing components, and to map those requirements to component selections and configurations. The paper demonstrates how to consistently deploy the Design Space technique throughout the process, leading to a complete and strongly tool-supported path from requirements capturing to system implementation.