From time to time books emerge which become part of APL's folklore; the obvious example being \"APL-An Interactive Approach\" by Gilman and Roses. Some are more recent and more tangentical in their relevance; exam-pies are Myers \"Refiable Software Through Composite Design\" and Tufte's \"Visualization of Quantitative Data\". I believe that this most recent book of Mr. Gilb's may be destined to become part of this select group. A long-standing belief in the APL world is, that we can deliver \"productivity\"-recent explorations of topics like Function Point Analysis are (belatedly) showing good quality evidence to back this belief. At heart I feel that Mr. Gilb is saying that even though we're moving in the fight direction we're still a very long way from the goal we ought to be shooting for-but that we can achieve the ultimate objective if we take a wider view of the world. Point one-the term 'software engineering' is being hijacked and is in imminent danger of becoming the vogue term for a much smaller range of topics than it purports to cover. Point two-APL applications have long tended to solve broader and more strategic problems than the more established languages. For all of his 442 pages, Mr. Gilb's messages axe brief, relevant and, I believe, achievable. They also embody common sense-that rarest of commodities-it is hard to believe that so many people can have been neglecting the principles for so long. I'd like to summarise his message in three ways. [1] Measure what you're being asked to do in terms meaningful to the business, user or application. And measure what you achieve. [2] Deliver your solution in many incremental stages-at all times delivering the highest value at least cost in the shortest time (remember, you just quantified all of this). [3] Early detection and solution of problems costs orders of magnitude less to fix than late detection and remedy. Think about it-its not novel is it? And doesn't the seemed message have a familiar ring7 What Mr. Glib is attempting to do is to bring rigour into the process. I think that if we were to adopt these methods in a similarly serious-minded vein we might easily discover a lot about ourselves and just possibly find a new way of getting our message into wider environments. I offer a challenge to the APL COmmunity in general and the APL90 organisers in particular. Lets find at least …

Principles of software engineering management

As in traditional software development, non-functional requirements play also a crucial role in service-oriented development. Non-functional requirements are spread across the entire service-oriented system or within individual services and cannot be allocated to one specific system / service artefact (such as a package, component). This makes them often more difficult to handle than functional requirements. The specifics of service-oriented architectures (in particular highly distributed services) bring up additional difficulties. In this paper, we present a taxonomy for non-functional requirements in a service-oriented context. The taxonomy implements three main categories of non-functional requirements: process requirements, non-functional external requirements, and non-functional service requirements. The taxonomy can be applied with individual services as well as with a service-based system as a whole. This taxonomy is considered as a starting point and check list when handling non-functional issues in service-oriented and particularly highly distributed environments.

A Taxonomy for Identifying and Specifying Non-Functional Requirements in Service-Oriented Development

http://deptinfo.cnam.fr/new/spip.php?pdoc6231

Integrating usability requirements that can be evaluated in design time into Model Driven Engineering of Web Information Systems

Context and Motivation: Agile development methods have become increasingly popular in the last years. However, these methods hardly pay attention to quality requirements (QRs), which could undermine the profits of fast delivery by introducing high rework efforts later on. This risk is high especially in agile large-scale distributed settings. Question/problem: Although several publications reported on the insufficient attention to quality requirements in agile methods, still little is known about agile requirements engineering practices and their impact on quality requirements in large-scale distributed settings. However, companies increasingly use agile methods in those settings, where the negative impact of ignoring quality requirements is large. Hence, the goal of this study is to identify the challenges in the engineering of quality requirements in large-scale distributed agile projects that have been researched so far, the agile practices that have contributed to the emergence of these challenges, and the proposed solutions. Principle ideas/results: Following an evidence-based research method, we examined 60 papers on quality requirements in agile. We found that, while there are multiple proposals to engineer quality requirements in agile, none of those has been tried out in real-life settings. Evaluating scalability of these proposals, therefore, is a priority for future research. Contribution: This paper identified 12 challenges in agile projects that harm the quality requirements. Besides, we identified and evaluated 13 proposals for dealing with quality requirements in agile projects, along with implications for practice and research.

Quality requirements in large-scale distributed agile projects - A systematic literature review

Traditional methods characterize a software product line's requirements using either functional or quality criteria. This appears to be inadequate to assess modularity, detect interferences, and analyze trade-offs. We take advantage of both symmetric and asymmetric views of aspects, and perform formal concept analysis to examine the functional and quality requirements of an evolving product line. The resulting concept lattice provides a rich notion which allows remarkable insights into the modularity and interactions of requirements. We formulate a number of problems that aspect-oriented product line requirements engineering should address, and present our solutions according to the concept lattice. We describe a case study applying our approach to analyze a mobile game product line's requirements, and review lessons learned.

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Concept analysis for product line requirements

The elicitation, analysis, and specification of quality requirements involve careful balancing of a broad spectrum of competing priorities. Developers must therefore focus on identifying qualities and designing solutions that optimize the product's value to its stakeholders.

J. David Blaine

Papers

Software Quality Requirements: How to Balance Competing Priorities