A behaviour-driven requirements engineering approach for agile product lines / Heba Moustafa Kamel Elshandidy ; Supervised Sherif A. Mazen , Ehab E. Hassanein , Eman Nasr

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Computers and Artificial Intelligence - Department of Information Systems

Due to the increasing need to achieve more flexible, higher responsive, and more economical software solutions, the research community has been growing interest in agile product line engineering throughout the past decade and half. One of the main research concerns in that domain is requirements engineering (RE), due to its critical role in the success of software projects. Research efforts in that area, however, still suffer many gaps that need to be filled. Firstly, research efforts were selective about which RE activity to be addressed rather than offering comprehensive solutions addressing all the RE activities. Secondly, the lack of adequate testing for the proposed research theories. Finally, most of the efforts focused on adopting agile practices into already existing software product line environments rather than using agile RE practices to build software product lines in agile-based environments. To overcome these research gaps, this thesis presents a novel flexible systematic RE approach for establishing and maintaining agile product lines called behaviour-driven requirements engineering using Kanban (BDRE-K). By using the behaviour-driven development method, this thesis shows that it is feasible to achieve a reactive requirements engineering approach for both functional and non-functional requirements. The findings of this research show the significant role of Specification by Example in achieving a reliable requirements engineering process. The thesis also sheds the light on the vital role of executable specifications in managing and maintaining the evolution of requirements throughout the development lifetime

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