Yan Li defended her PhD

A system product line (PL) develops product requirements by reusing domain requirements artefacts, including textual requirements and requirement models. In practice textual requirements are organized hierarchically based on the architecture of the PL. However, the current literature lacks approaches that can help practitioners to systematically and automatically develop structured and configuration-ready PL textual requirements. In the context of product line engineering and model based engineering, automatic textual requirements structuring can benefit from models. Such a structured PL requirements repository can greatly facilitate the development of product-specific requirements repository, the product configuration at the requirements level and the smooth transition to downstream product configuration phases. To tackle this challenge, her thesis presents a methodology with tool support, which is built on existing model-based, natural language processing, similarity measure techniques, and search-based techniques to support generating and configuring textual requirements, and assure the quality of the product-specific requirements.

The thesis was written within the field of Requirements Engineering and Software Product Line Engineering. The work has been conducted at Simula Research Laboratory and Beihang University.

The adjudication committee

• Professor, Zhi Jin, Peking University
• Senior Research Scientist, Jun Wei, Chinese Academy of Sciences
• Professor, Juanzi Li, Tsinghua University
• Professor, Xudong Liu, Beihang University
• Professor, Chao Liu, Beihang University

Chair of the disputation

• Professor, Zhi Jin, Peking University

Supervisors

• Professor, Li Zhang, Beihang University
• Chief Research Scientist, Tao Yue, Simula Research Laboratory
• Senior Research Scientist, Shaukat Ali, Simula Research Laboratory