Scope definition in software product lines: A semi-automatic approach through linguistic annotation

To identify the reuse assets that should be developed in a software product line, it is necessary to perform an activity called product line scoping, which aims at identify and define products, features and areas of the field that should be part of the product line, as well as common and variables features. When creating the product line from existent legacy systems, the scoping activity must use the knowledge about the products of these software systems. The approaches for scoping are dependent of the knowledge about the product's domain. Therefore, it is necessary to have the domain expert participation, however this professional often do not have too much free time. We present a proposal to analyze documents and to identify features of a product line semi-automatically, using techniques of linguistic annotation in order to minimize the time spent by domain experts.