Authors:
Thi-Thuy-Hang Hoang
and
Manuel Kolp
Affiliation:
Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Keyword(s):
Quality requirement, Goal, Hard-goal, Soft-goal, Functional requirement, Non-Functional Requirements.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Methodologies, Processes and Platforms
;
Model-Driven Software Development
;
Modeling Formalisms, Languages and Notations
;
Requirements Analysis And Management
;
Software Engineering
;
Systems Engineering
Abstract:
Requirements are input for the process of building software. Depending on the development methodology, they are usually classified into several subclasses of requirements. Traditional approaches distinguish between functional and non-functional requirements and the modern goal-based approaches use hard-goals and soft-goals to describe requirements. While non-functional requirements are known also as quality requirements, neither hard-goals nor soft-goals are equivalent to quality requirements. Due to the abstractness of quality requirements, they are usually described as soft-goals but soft-goals are not necessarily quality requirements. In this paper, we propose a way to clear the problematic ambiguity between soft-goals and quality requirements in goal-based context. We try to reposition the notion of quality requirement in the relations to hard-goals and soft-goals. This allows us to decompose a soft-goal into a set of hard-goals (required functions) and quality requirements (requ
ired qualities of function). The immediate applications of this analysis are quality-aware development methodologies for multi-agent systems among which QTropos is an example.
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