Research preview: Prioritizing quality requirements based on software architecture evaluation feedback

Abstract

[Context and motivation] Quality requirements are a main driver for architectural decisions of software systems. Although the need for iterative handling of requirements and architecture has been identified, current architecture design processes do not provide systematic, quantitative feedback for the prioritization and cost/benefit considerations for quality requirements. [Question/problem] Thus, in practice stakeholders still often state and prioritize quality requirements before knowing the software architecture, i.e. without knowledge about the quality dependencies, conflicts, incurred costs, and technical feasibility. However, as quality properties usually are cross-cutting architecture concerns, estimating the effects of design decisions is difficult. Thus, stakeholders cannot reliably know the appropriate required level of quality. [Principal ideas/results] In this research proposal, we suggest an approach to generate feedback from quantitative architecture evaluation to requirements engineering, in particular to requirements prioritization. We propose to use automated design space exploration techniques to generate information about available trade-offs. Final quality requirement prioritization is deferred until first feedback from architecture evaluation is available. [Contribution] In this paper, we present the process model of our approach enabling feedback to requirement prioritization and describe application scenarios and an example. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.