Qualitative Software Reliability Requirements: Concept, Classification and Practical Elicitation Methods

摘要

Software reliability requirements are specified at the software requirement phase to describe software reliability considerations, which are the key to ensuring software reliability, therefore gaining increasing importance. Qualitative software reliability requirements, as an essential part of software reliability requirements, reflect the idea that software reliability should be designed into software products at an early stage. However, from current engineering practices, the concept of qualitative software reliability requirements remains unclear, and qualitative software reliability requirements elicitation is still inadequate. To solve the issues above, this paper puts forward the definition of qualitative software reliability requirements, classification of qualitative software reliability requirements, and a practical qualitative software reliability requirements elicitation strategy as well as methods, which are used to support guidance of qualitative software reliability requirements elicitation process. A case study of a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) demonstrates the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed approaches.