A Structured Approach for Eliciting, Modeling, and Using Quality-Related Domain Knowledge

In requirements engineering, properties of the environment and assumptions about it, called domain knowledge, need to be captured in addition to exploring the requirements. Despite the recognition of the significance of capturing and using the required domain knowledge, it might be missing, left implicit, or be captured inadequately during the software development. This results in an incorrect specification. Moreover, the software might fail to achieve its quality objectives because of ignored required constraints and assumptions. In order to analyze software quality properly, we propose a structured approach for eliciting, modeling, and using domain knowledge. We investigate what kind of quality-related domain knowledge is required for the early phases of qualitydriven software development and how such domain knowledge can be systematically elicited and explicitly modeled to be used for the analysis of quality requirements. Our method aims at improving the quality of the requirements engineering process by facilitating the capturing and using of implicit domain knowledge.