Architecture conception is a difficult and time consuming process, requiring advanced skills from the software architect. The tasks of an architect are alleviated if means can be provided to generate architectures that can be evaluated with respect to functional and nonfunctional requirements. This paper discusses an approach for doing so. It centers around a rich feature-solution graph which c...

The high non-functional requirements put on payment systems result in increasing complexity. One way of providing the expected quality is usage of a specialized platform. However, development on such a platform can be very expensive. In this paper we examine what level of quality can be expected when the development is done on a standard platform. We suggest a number of architectures and evalua...

Software modeling has received a lot a of attention in the last decade and now is an important support for the design process. Actually, the design process is very important to the usability and understandability of the system, for example functional requirements present a complete description of how the system will function from the user’s perspective, while non-functional requirements dictate...

Recently, the impact of design patterns on software quality has attracted a gradual attention since design patterns encapsulate valuable knowledge to resolve design problems and improve design quality. As an attempt towards the investigation of applying goals and design patterns to realize the model transformation, we proposed, in this paper, a goal-driven model transformation by applying desig...

During the years, softgoals have enjoyed much attention in the requirement engineering (RE) community for handling non-functional requirements (NFRs). As pointed out by RE researchers in recent years, softgoal may not be the right concept for non-functional requirements since it also captures early functional requirements (FRs) that are vaguely defined, e.g., “increase profit”. Alternatively, q...

Aspects are originally introduced to capture cross-cutting concerns among classes. Often this cross-cutting concerns ends up being non-functional requirements. We can use Softgoal Interdependency Graphs(SIG) to systematically analyze and design non-functional requirements. In this paper, we propose a set of rules that could be used to capture the information in SIGs as classpects. Then the clas...

Organizational collaborate more and more in organizational networks to remain competitive. New systems can be created by assembling a set of elementary services provided by various organizations. Several composition methods are available, yet these methods are not adopted in practice as they are primarily supply-driven and cannot deal the complex characteristics of organizational networks. In t...

RECENTLY IFPUG RELEASED THE NEW SNAP (SOFTWARE NON-FUNCTIONAL ASSESSMENT PROCESS) METHOD, AIMED TO SIZE THE NON-FUNCTIONAL SIDE OF A SOFTWARE APPLICATION. FROM FPA CREATION ON, NFRS (NONFUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS) WERE TYPICALLY DEALT AS “REQUIREMENTS OF A LESSER GOD”, WHILE THEY REPRESENT SIMPLY A DIFFERENT AND COMPLEMENTAR CONTRIBUTION TO A PROJECT THAN FURS (FUNCTIONAL USER REQUIREMENTS). THIS ...

Recent work in the field of middleware technology proposes semantic spaces as a tool for coping with the scalability, heterogeneity and dynamism issues of large scale distributed IT environments. In this paper we discuss the impact that functional and non-functional requirements have on the scalability of a semantic space installation. Based on this analysis we elaborate on the application scen...

This paper introduces SenSer, a generic middleware framework that allows for the Web access and management of sensor networks by virtualizing their functionalities as services, in a way that is programming language and sensor network development platform independent. We present the SenSer architectural model and provide a concrete Javabased implementation that exposes the framework as two Web s...