Architecture based requirements modeling for software reuse

Existing software reuse strategies focus on reusing program codes or binary codes. However, reusability is not universal property of program codes, software reuse has never achieved its full potential. Requirements within the same domain are more likely to be similar than the software components. Requirements reuse can provide an enhanced opportunity for reusing software components. Traceability and understandability of requirements model are critical for requirements reuse. Current researches concentrate on unstructured and informal requirements modeling. It is hard for the customer and the developer to trace and to understand the requirements model. In this paper, we construct requirements model by architecture based modeling approach, and the relationships between components are defined formally. Requirements model consists of organization patterns and requirements partition patterns, the traceability between problem space and software requirements is established as the side effect of requirements modeling. The constructed requirements model is traceable, maintainable, and understandable, hence reusable.