Skip to main content

Advertisement

Springer Nature Link
Log in

An ASPIRE-based method for quality requirements identification from business goals

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Requirements Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Quality requirements are the main drivers for modeling and evaluating software quality at an early stage, and ASPIRE is an engineering method designed to elicit and document the quality requirements of embedded systems. This paper proposes an extension to ASPIRE to identify quality requirements from the business goals of the organization and ensure their traceability. This extension includes a set of added components created from the main concepts of the SOQUAREM methodology, including the BMM (business motivation model), derivation rules, the quality attribute utility tree, the quality attribute scenario template, the quality attribute documentation template, and ISO 9126. The applicability of the extended method is illustrated with a wireless plant control system as an example.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The term “NFR” is used in the ASPIRE method, while in this paper, we prefer to use the term “QR.”

References

  1. Callele D, Penzenstadler B, Wnuk K (2013) Risk identification at the interface between business case and requirements. REFSQ’13 19th international conference on requirements engineering: foundation for software quality. Springer-Verlag Berlin, Heidelberg, pp. 253–268

  2. Zowghi D, Coulin C (2005) Requirements elicitation: a survey of techniques, approaches, and tools. Engineering and managing software requirements. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 19–46. doi: 10.1007/3-540-28244-0_2

  3. Al-Rawas A, Easterbrook SM (1996) Communication problems in requirements engineering: a field study. Cognitive science research papers, University of Sussex at Brighton, Brighton

    Google Scholar 

  4. Sajjad U, Qaisar HM (2010) Issues and challenges of requirement elicitation in large web projects. Master Thesis Computer Science Thesis no: MCS-2010:05, School of Computing Blekinge Institute of Technology, Ronneby, Sweden

  5. Sommerville I (2006) Software engineering, 8th edn. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston. ISBN 0321313798

    Google Scholar 

  6. Cysneiros LM, Sampaio do Prado Leite LC (2004) Non-functional requirements: from elicitation to conceptual models. IEEE Trans Softw Eng, 30(5):328–350, IEEE Press Piscataway, NJ, USA. doi:10.1109/TSE.2004.10

  7. Bredemeyer D, Malan R (2001) Defining Non-functional requirements. Bredemeyer Consulting, White Paper. 8 p. http://www.bredemeyer.com. Accessed 19 Mar 2013

  8. Chung L, Sampaio do Prado Leite LC (2009) On non-functional requirements in software engineering. Conceptual modeling: foundations and applications. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, pp. 363–379. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-02463-4_19

  9. Hill RL, Wang J, Nahrstedt K (2004) Quantifying non-functional requirements: a process oriented approach. 12th IEEE international conference on requirements engineering (RE), September 6-10, Kyoto, Japan, pp. 352–353

  10. Wiegers K (1999) Writing QRs. process impact. http://www.processimpact.com/articles/qualreqs.html. Published in Software Development Magazine. Accessed 05 May 2013

  11. Poort ER, de With PHN (2004) Resolving requirement conflicts through non-functional decomposition. 4th working IEEE/IFIP conference on software architecture (WICSA), 12–15 June Oslo, Norway, pp 145–154

  12. Herrmann A, Paech B (2008) MOQARE: misuse-oriented quality requirements engineering. Requirements Eng J 13(1):73–86. Springer-Verlag New York, Inc. Secaucus, NJ, USA

  13. Brito I, Moreira A, Araujo J (2002) A requirements model for quality attributes. Workshop on “early aspects: aspect-oriented requirements engineering and architecture design”, 1st international conference on aspect-oriented software development. 22–26 April University of Twente, Enschede, Holland, pp. 1–6

  14. Jacobson I, Christerson M, Jonsson P, Övergaard G (1992) Object-oriented software engineering: a use case driven approach. Addison-Wesley, Wokingham, England

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  15. Trendowicz A, Punter T (2003) Quality modeling for software product lines. 7th ECOOP workshop on quantitative approaches in object-oriented software engineering, QAOOSE, Darmstadt, Germany

  16. Chung L, Nixon BA, Yu E, Mylopoulos J (2000) Non-functional requirements in software engineering. Kluwer Academic Publishing

  17. Doerr J, Kerkow D, Koenig T et al (2005) Non-functional requirements in industry: three case studies adopting the ASPIRE™ NFR method. 13th IEEE international conference on requirements engineering (RE), August 29–September 2, Paris, France, pp 373–384

  18. Kerkow D, Kohler K, Doerr J (2003) Usability and other quality aspects derived from use cases. Performance by design. USE - second international conference on usage-centered design, October 18–22, Portsmouth, New Hampshire, pp 135–154

  19. Doerr J (2011) Non-functional requirements. lecture: requirements engineering WS 2010/2011. http://www.agse.informatik.uni-kl.de/teaching/re/ws2010/Vorlesung%20RE_WS1011_NFR.pdf. Accessed 23 May 2013

  20. Institute Experimentelles Software Engineering. http://www.iese.fraunhofer.de/index.jsp. Accessed 15 Oct 2013

  21. Herrmann A, Weiß D (2009) Alignment of software specifications with quality-and business goals in the SIKOSA method. PRIMIUM: Process Innovation for Enterprise Software, Mannheim, pp 27–42

    Google Scholar 

  22. Djouab R, Suryn W (2011) SOQUAREM: software quality requirements engineering method. SQM conference on quality management. 18–20 Apr Loughborough University, Leicestershire, UK

  23. ISO, IEC 9126–1 (2001) Software engineering: product quality—Part 1: quality model. International Organization for Standardization, Geneva

    Google Scholar 

  24. Azuma M (2004) Applying ISO/IEC 9126-1 quality model to QRs engineering on critical software. Sixth international workshop on requirements for high assurance systems (RHAS 2004), Kyoto, Japan, pp 3–10

  25. ISO/IEC 25030 (2007) Software engineering—software product quality requirements and evaluation (SQuaRE)—quality requirements. International Organization for Standardization

  26. Abran A, Bourque P, Dupuis R, Moore JW, Tripp LL (eds) (2004) Guide to the software engineering body of knowledge-SWEBOK. IEEE-CS Press, Piscataway

    Google Scholar 

  27. Campbell J (2007) Lecture 9, Part 2: Non-functional requirements. CSC340 - Winter 2007, University of Toronto. http://www.cdf.toronto.edu/~csc340h/winter/lectures/w10/L9-part2-6up.pdf. Accessed Aug 2014

  28. Borg A (2004) Contributions to management and validation of non-functional requirements. Linköpings universitet, PELAB - Laboratoriet för programmeringsomgivningar, Linköpings universitet, Tekniska högskolan (författare), BokAvhandlingEngelska

    Google Scholar 

  29. Amyot D, Mussbacher G (2003) URN: towards a new standard for the visual description of requirements. Telecommunications and beyond: the broader applicability of SDL and MSC. Edel Sherratt (Ed.) SAM, Lecture Notes in Computer Science. 25(99):21–37

  30. Castro J, Kolp M, Mylopoulos J (2002) Towards requirements-driven information systems engineering: the Tropos project. Inf Syst 27(6):365–389

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  31. Dutoit AH, Paech B (2002) Rationale-based use case specification. Requir Eng 7(1):3–19

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  32. Hill R, Wan J, Nahrstedt K (2004) Quantifying non-functional requirements: a process oriented approach. 12th IEEE international conference on requirements engineering. 6–11 Sept pp. 352–353

  33. Rilston F, Paim S, Castro JFB (2002) Enhancing data warehouse design with the NFR framework. 5th Workshop on requirements engineering (WER2002), Valencia Spain, pp 11–12

  34. Supakkul S, Chung L (2012) The RE-tools: a multi-notational requirements modeling toolkit. 20th IEEE International conference on requirements engineering. 24–28 Sept pp 333–334

  35. Yrjönen A, Merilinna J (2009) Extending the NFR framework with measurable non- functional requirements. 2nd international workshop on non-functional system properties in domain specific modeling languages. Denver, Colorado, USA

  36. Nasir MM, Arif M, Samina K, Tehmina K, Faisal MM (2009) Measurable and scalable NFRs using fuzzy logic and likert scale. International journal of computer science and information security (IJCSIS), 2(1). http://dblp.uni-trier.de/db/journals/corr/corr0906.html#abs-0906-5393. Accessed Aug 2014

  37. Dewi M, Didar Z, Nurie N (2009) Managing conflicts among non-functional requirements. 12th Australian workshop on requirements engineering (AWRE ‘09), Sydney Australia

  38. Davis AM (2003) The art of requirements triage. Comput J 363:42–49. IEEE Computer Society Press Los Alamitos, CA, USA. doi:10.1109/MC.2003.1185216

  39. Boehm HI, Barry W, Rodgers TL, Deutsch M (2001) Applying win–win to quality requirements: a case study. 23rd International Conference on Software Engineering Toronto, Ontario, Canada IEEE Computer Society, pp 555–564

  40. Saaty TL (1980) The analytic hierarchy process. McGraw-Hill, New York

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  41. Beck K (1999) Extreme programming explained. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston

    Google Scholar 

  42. Egyed A, Grunbacher P (2004) Identifying requirements conflicts and cooperation: how quality attributes and automated traceability can help. IEEE Softw 21(6):50–58

    Article  Google Scholar 

  43. Boehm HI, Barry W (1999) Cost versus quality requirements: conflict analysis and negotiation aids. Softw Q Prof 1(2):38–50

    Google Scholar 

  44. Glinz M (2007) On non-functional requirements. 15th IEEE international requirements engineering conference (RE). 15–19 Oct New Delhi, India, pp 21–26

  45. Mylopoulos J (2004) Non-functional requirements, information systems analysis and design. http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~jm/340S/Slides2/NFR.pdf. Accessed Jan 2013

  46. Gross D, Yu E (2001) Evolving system architecture to meet changing business goals: an agent and goal-oriented approach. 5th IEEE international symposium on requirements engineering (RE), 27–31 Aug Toronto, Canada, pp 316–317. doi:10.1109/ISRE.2001.948602

  47. Punter T, Van Solingen R, Trienekens JM (1997) Software product evaluation: current status and future needs for customers and industry. 4th IT evaluation (EVIT-97), Delft, the Netherlands, pp 1–11

  48. Carvallo JP, Franch X (2003) Using QMs in software package selection. IEEE Softw 20(1):34–41

    Article  Google Scholar 

  49. Van Solingen R, Kusters RJ, Trienekens JM (1999) Identifying embedded software quality: two approaches. Q Reliab Eng Int 15(6):485–492. doi:10.1002/(SICI)1099-1638(199911/12)15:6<485:AID-QRE295>3.0.CO;2-3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  50. Djouab R (2012) Software product quality requirements engineering method: SOQUAREM. Ph.D dissertation, École of Technologie Supérieure—Université du Québec, Montréal, QC, Canada

  51. Djouab R, Suryn W (2007) Applicability analysis of two QRs treatment methods: ASPIRE and FDAF. International conference on software and systems engineering and their applications (ICSSEA), 4–6 Dec Conservatoire National des Arts et Métiers, Paris, France

  52. Fagnani S (2014) What are business goals? eHow Contributor. http://www.ehow.com/facts_5758424_business-goals_.html#ixzz2zjhOx0Rc. Accessed April 2014

  53. Kazman R, Bass L (2005) Categorizing business goals for software architectures. Technical report CMU/SEI- 2005-TR-021, Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. http://www.sei.cmu.edu/library/abstracts/reports/05tr021.cfm. Accessed May 2014

  54. Weiß D, Leukel J, Kirn S (2008) A method for aligning business process modeling and software requirements engineering. PRIMIUM Subconference at the Multikonferenz Wirtschaftsinformatik (MKWI), (February 26–28, Garching, Germany). CEUR-WS.org CEUR Workshop Proceedings

  55. Basili VR, Heidrich J et al (2013) Linking software development and business strategy through measurement. IEEE Comput 43(4):57–65. doi:10.1109/MC.2010.108

    Article  Google Scholar 

  56. Bleistein SJ, Cox K, Verner J (2006) Validating strategic alignment of organizational IT requirements using goal modeling and problem diagrams. J Syst Softw 79(3):362–378

    Article  Google Scholar 

  57. Bleistein SJ, Aurum A, Cox K, Ray PK (2004) Strategy-oriented alignment in requirements engineering: linking business strategy to requirements of e-business systems using the SOARE approach. J Res Pract Inf Technol 36(4):259–276

    Google Scholar 

  58. Morris PWG, Jamieson A (2005) Moving from corporate strategy to project strategy. Project Manag J. 36(4):5–18. ISSN 87569728

  59. Clements P, Bass L (2010) Relating business goals to architecturally significant requirements for software systems. Technical note CMU/SEI-2010-TN-018 Research, Technology, and System Solutions Program

  60. Business Rules Group (BRG) (2007) Business motivation model (Version 1.3). http://www.businessrulesGroup.org. Accessed April 2013

  61. Zubrow D (2004) Software quality requirements and evaluation, the ISO 25000 series. PSM technical working group. Carnegie Mellon University. Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, 35 p. http://www.psmsc.com/Downloads/TWGFeb04/04ZubrowISO25000SWQualityMeasurement.pdf. Accessed Aug 2014

  62. Kazman R, Klein M, Clements P (2000) ATAM: method for architecture evaluation. Technical report CMU/SEI-2000-TR-004. Software Engineering Institution, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA, 83 p

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Software and IT Engineering, École de technologie supérieure, 1100, Notre-Dame Street West, Montreal, QC, H3C 1K3, Canada

    Rachida Djouab & Alain Abran

  2. Software Engineering and Information Management, Lappeenranta University of Technology (LUT) , CS 20, FI-53851, Lappeenranta, Finland

    Ahmed Seffah

  3. School of Industrial Engineering and Management, Lappeenranta, Finland

    Ahmed Seffah

Authors
  1. Rachida Djouab
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Alain Abran
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  3. Ahmed Seffah
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rachida Djouab.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Djouab, R., Abran, A. & Seffah, A. An ASPIRE-based method for quality requirements identification from business goals. Requirements Eng 21, 87–106 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-014-0211-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-014-0211-1

Keywords