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Distinguishing Soft-Goals and Quality Requirements in Software Requirements Modeling

Authors:
Thi-Thuy-Hang Hoang
Alain Pirotte

Keywords: requirements models, data modeling, soft-goals, quality requirements, non-functional requirements

Abstract:
Requirements engineering plays an essential role in software development. Requirements are prescriptive statements that express situations to be enforced by a system in terms of its effects on its environment. There have been many discussions of functional versus non-functional requirements, of hard-goals versus soft-goals, of non-functional and quality requirements versus soft-goals. Quality requirements have often been treated as special cases of non-functional requirements or of soft-goals, without a clearly convincing distinction. In this paper, we formulate a somewhat unusual definition and metamodel for “quality requirements” and we explore some of its consequences. Quality requirements are not defined as a special kind of soft-goals, but as constraints on goals. We adapt the usual techniques of goal refinement to our definition and we argue that thus distinguishing soft-goals and quality requirements contributes to clarifying the system development process and the management of quality by the resulting software products.

Pages: 9 to 14

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012

Publication date: February 29, 2012

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4332

ISBN: 978-1-61208-185-4

Location: Saint Gilles, Reunion

Dates: from February 29, 2012 to March 5, 2012