Experience with Variability Management in Requirement Specifications

The efficient reuse of requirements is a main challenge in industries that offer products with a high degree of reuse in their components, like the automotive industry. Here, an efficient and effective variability management (VM) that is highly integrated with the requirements specification process is an essential prerequisite for successful reuse of requirements. This paper presents experiences gained while introducing VM-based requirements reuse for natural language specifications at Daimler passenger car development. Here, out-of-the-box approaches were inappropriate due to poor scalability, inappropriate tool support, and the need to use decentralized variability models. As a consequence, we had to modify existing approaches to make them work in our environment. The paper briefly describes these modifications along with observations gained while implementing them in real-world specification processes.