Title : A Prescriptive Semantic Basis for System Lifecycle Properties

The content in this paper is in pre-published, draft form. It has not been peer-reviewed and should be used for informational purposes only. The authors warn that the paper may contain typos, misquotes, incomplete, and possibly incorrect content. It is intended that the paper will be revised and elevated to " published " status, at which point the quality caveat will be lifted. Abstract. The concept of incorporating " ilities " into systems seems a self‐evidently good idea, as expressed by both written and spoken positions by technical and political leaders. Indeed, incorporating lifecycle properties such as flexibility, adaptability, and recently affordability, into systems is touted as the solution to modern day's ever increasing complexity, schedule and budget pressures, and need for finding sustainable solutions. While expressing desires for ilities seems straightforward, tracing these desires to verifiable system instantiations remains ambiguous at best. This paper describes the semantic challenge underlying the concept of a coherent set of system properties, a sampling of various efforts to ascribe meaning to particular ilities, and proposes a prescriptive semantic basis for specifying a set of ilities, while avoiding the assertion of new definitions. The intention for this first pass prescriptive semantic basis is to begin a structured approach for exploring the existence of one or more semantic fields, which together form a coherent semantic framework for tracing desired ilities into verifiable system requirements and specifications. Preliminary results indicate that at least three semantic fields exist within the larger set of system lifecycle properties including changeability‐type, architecture‐type, and new ability‐type ilities.