Using UML to reflect non-functional requirements

The way requirements should drive the rest of the software development process has been a subject of many research projects in the past. Unfortunately, all of them focus primarily, when not exclusively, on the functional requirements regardless of the fact that non-functional requirements (NFR) are among the most expensive and difficult to deal with [6] [13] [4][10]. This work evolves out of a previous one [11] and aims at filling this gap, proposing a systematic approach to assure that conceptual models will reflect the NFRs elicited. We focus our attention on conceptual models expressed using the UML [25], and therefore, some heuristics are proposed to make UML suitable to handle NFRs.