SOQUAREM: SOftware QUAlity Requirements Engineering Method

IT industry needs reliable data about quality requirements to evaluate adequately systems and their architecture. The task is not easy due to nature of these requirements. In fact they are vague, difficult to define and often conflicting with other requirements. Today’s quality requirements management methods are dealing either with one quality requirement aspect (ex: FDAF framework for security or performance aspect) or are developed for a specific type of software (IESE NFR for embedded software). MOQARE is the only method which has been developed to deal with several types of requirements; however, it requires a MOQARE specialist to apply it in industry. The common key point related to all these methods is: “how to identify quality requirements from original source requirements of a system, user and business?” This step seems to be simplified or bypassed by simple interviews or questionnaires, but experience shows that this is a fundamental task required to ensure the correct, operational and properly detailed definition of quality attributes. In this paper, we present SOQUAREM (SOftware QUAlity Requirements Engineering Method), a method to identify and define quality requirements. The aim of SOQUAREM is to support systematic identification of quality requirements at the definition phase of software development lifecycle. It provides a general process model of quality requirements engineering and a business-based process for deriving them in a top down fashion.