Combining case-based reasoning and commonality analysis for software requirements reuse

Requirements reuse may significantly reduce life cycle costs by improving the quality of requirements specifications, mitigating risks, and facilitating design, code, and test reuse. A novel process is presented describing how the combination of case based reasoning (CBR) techniques and the commonality analysis (CA) may be used to provide tool based support for efficient requirements reuse for a domain. Case based reasoning is a problem Solving and knowledge reuse technique. The commonality analysis is a software engineering technique that highlights the variabilities and commonalities of systems within a domain. A domain, a family of systems, is a set of existing and future applications with overlapping capabilities and data. The CA/CBR system structures system artifacts based on commonalities and variabilities. The CA/CBR system uses similarity based retrieval of requirements traceability matrices to effectively create requirements documents of a new system based on a selection of high level requirements. Furthermore, the CA/CBR system takes into consideration effort estimates for the new system derived from historical data and requirements traceability. The process is evaluated through a series of experiments involving the development of a sample CA document and sample systems within a domain. Empirical results suggest that the CA/CBR system may improve the efficiency of requirements elicitation and provide a reasonable development effort estimate at the requirements phase.