Refining and reasoning about nonfunctional requirements

摘要

Nonfunctional requirements (NFR) must be addressed early in the software development cycle to avoid the cost of revisiting those requirements or re-factoring at the later stages of the development cycle. Methods and frameworks that identify and incorporate NFR at each stage of development cycle reduce this cost. The methodology used in this work for refining and reasoning about NFR is based on the NFR framework. This work identifies four NFR types and provides the methodology for developing domain specific NFR by using techniques for converting the requirements into design artifacts per NFR type. The contribution is four NFR types: Functionally Restrictive, Additive Restrictive, Policy Restrictive, and Architecture Restrictive and the software engineering process that provides specific refinements that result in unique architectural and design artifacts. By applying the same functional requirement focus to the different NFR domains it enhances the development process and promotes software quality attributes such as composability, maintainability, evolvability, and traceability.