Chapter 4 - Optimizing Functional and Quality Requirements According to Stakeholders’ Goals

Abstract

High-quality software has to consider various quality issues and different stakeholder goals. Such diverse requirements may be conflicting, and the conflicts may not be visible at first sight. We propose a method to obtain an optimal set of requirements that contains no conflicts and satisfies the stakeholder goals and quality requirements to the largest possible extent. We first capture the stakeholders’ goals and then analyze functional and quality requirements using an extension of the problem frame approach. To obtain an optimal set of requirements, we first determine candidates for requirements interaction. For negatively interacting requirements, we derive alternatives in a systematic way. To prepare for the optimization, we need to assign values to the different requirements. To determine those values, we apply the Analytical Network Process (ANP). Finally, we use existing optimizer tools to obtain a set of requirements that has a maximal value with respect to the previously determined values and that does not contain any conflicting requirements. We illustrate our method with the real-life example of smart metering.