Annotation of Software Requirements Specification (SRS), Extractions of Nonfunctional Requirements, and Measurement of Their Tradeoff

Abstract

Software requirement artifacts such as manuals request for proposals, and software requirements specification (SRS) are commonly focused on functional requirements. In most SRS files, nonfunctional requirements do not formally encoded or encoded as a whole, not for an individual design problem. Moreover, these nonfunctional requirements are intermingled with functional requirements. Therefore, these nonfunctional requirements need special attention to understand for successful project development. These nonfunctional requirements have an impact on each other and optimal tradeoff is required for balanced nonfunctional requirements set. NFRs have a negative and positive tradeoff with each other such as increase confidentiality, decrease the availability, and enhance authenticity. So, an optimum tradeoff among these design problem within a module is required to have better design decisions. Instead of considering all nonfunctional requirements, the NFRs that have mutual tradeoff is considered. In this paper, we devised a novel document annotation scheme for SRS and extracted nonfunctional requirements from these annotated artifacts. In the next step, we classified NFRs into two classes security triad and performance triad, and the cost is assumed constant for each NFR. From the design problem, the tradeoff ratio is calculated among NFRs associated with it. Then, the production possibility graph is plotted to estimate the optimum tradeoff ratio within the module. For estimation economic optimum from a set of NFR, iso-cost graphs by assuming the constant cost. Some hypothetical variations in cost are also examined using 3D iso-cost graph. The reason to measure these tradeoff is to make design decision more empirical and helpful for the selection of design patterns, especially secure design patterns.