Abstract The development of software‐intensive technical systems involves several engineering disciplines like mechanical, electrical, control, and particularly software engineering. Model‐based Systems Engineering (MBSE) coordinates these disciplines throughout the development by means of discipline‐spanning processes and a system model. Such a system model provides a common understanding of the system under development and serves as a starting point for the discipline‐specific development. An integral part of MBSE is the requirements engineering on the system level. However, these requirements need to be refined for the discipline‐specific development to start, for example, into specific requirements for the embedded software. Because existing MBSE approaches lack support for this refinement step, we conceived in previous work a systematic transition from MBSE to model‐based software requirements engineering. We automated the steps of the transition where possible, in order to avoid error‐prone and time‐consuming manual tasks. In this paper, we extend this approach with support for subsequent process iterations and provide an algorithm for the automated steps. We illustrate the approach and perform a case study with an example of an automotive embedded system. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The development of software-intensive technical systems (e.g., within the automotive industry) involves several engineering disciplines like mechanical, electrical, control, and software engineering. Model-based Systems Engineering (MBSE) coordinates these disciplines throughout the development by means of discipline-spanning processes and system models. Such a system model provides a common understanding of the system under development and serves as a starting point for the discipline-specific development. An integral part of MBSE is the requirements engineering on the system level. However, for the discipline-specific development to start, these requirements need to be refined, e.g., into specific requirements for the embedded software. Since existing MBSE approaches lack support for this refinement step, we conceived a systematic transition from MBSE to model-based software requirements engineering, which we present in this paper. We automated the steps of the transition where possible, in order to avoid error-prone and time-consuming manual tasks. We illustrate the approach with an example of an automotive embedded system.

Design pattern detection is a reverse engineering methodology that helps software engineers to analyze and understand legacy software by recovering its design and thereby aiding in the preparation of re-engineering activities. We present Reclipse, a reverse engineering tool suite for static and dynamic design pattern detection in combination with a pattern candidate rating used to assess the detection results' reliability.