Mapping requirements to reusable components using Design Spaces

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, the paper shows how Design Spaces can be applied to actively support reuse oriented activities. Design Spaces allow us 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 capture to system implementation.