A standard-based reference framework for system operations requirements

European series of standards for the aerospace industry, includes system operations requirements as one of 16 types of NFRs for embedded and real-time systems. A number of concepts are provided in the ECSS and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) standards to describe the various types of candidate operations requirements at the system, software and hardware levels. In the absence of such a generic and detailed model, these NFRs are typically handled much later on in the software development life cycle, when, at system testing time, users and developers may discover that a number of system operations requirements have been overlooked and additional work is required to implement them. This paper organises these dispersed operations concepts into a standards-based reference framework of system operations requirements.