Towards recyclable system requirements

With the increasing importance and complexity of software systems in cars, car manufacturers are faced with new challenges: very large specification documents with a fast growing portion concerning software must be handled by engineers without dedicated backgrounds in computer science. The development must be accompanied by completely new processes. All this is under the pressure to reduce time-to-market and development costs. In this paper we focus on the early phase of software development and describe a planned approach to obtain high quality and well structured requirement specifications by revisiting development artifacts of former similar systems. We present experiences in following this approach with concrete methods, namely introducing use cases in this case. The benefits and difficulties with this method are discussed and future research directions are pointed out.