Software Engineering Institute

Quality attribute requirements have a significant influence on the software architecture of a system. They guide the decisions about patterns, tactics, and approaches that will contribute to the formation of the architecture. It has been our observation that quality attribute requirements are not routinely specified in a manner that makes them useful to an architect. To assess how well different requirement specification methods serve an architect's goals and needs for choosing architectural approaches, we examined natural language requirements using "shall" and "will," use case analysis, the quality attribute workshop, global analysis, and an approach by Fergus O'Brien that we call "O'Brien's approach." We selected these methods either due to their widespread use, and/or their emphasis on the capture of quality attributes requirements in particular.

Ipek presents the evaluation criteria under these methods have been examined. She then introduces each method with a descriptive example and an evaluation using the criteria. The talk concludes by comparing the methods against each.