CAPTURE SOFTWARE-DESIGN RATIONALE BASED ON AN INTEGRATED ANALYSIS OF BOTH SOFTWARE PROCESS AND PRODUCT QUALITY REQUIREMENTS FROM MULTIPLE PERSPECTIVES

The capture of design rationale in terms of the process and product qu ality requirements for a software system from different perspectives i n concurrent engineering poses two challenges: (1) process and product quality requirements arising from different perspectives usually conf lict with each other; and (2) both process and product quality require ments are often vague and imprecise. Recent research into methods for handling software quality requirements has taken one of two approaches -quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative approaches are based upon software metrics and specify requirements using predicate logic. Quali tative approaches represent requirements qualitatively and decompose t he requirements into a hierarchy of subrequirements. A unified approac h for specifying and analyzing requirements quantitatively and qualita tively is also developed based on fuzzy logic. However, none of these methods addresses design rationale capture based on integrated analysi s of both product and process quality requirements from multiple persp ectives in concurrent software development. In this paper a formal fra mework is developed for an integrated analysis of software process and product quality requirements to support design rationale capture from multiple perspectives in concurrent software development. It provides a top-down approach for decomposing vague, complex quality requiremen ts based upon an ontological model of a perspective, and a bottom-up a pproach for analyzing inter-requirement relationships from multiple pe rspectives. A feature-based approach for assessing the impact of desig n alternatives on both process and product quality requirements from m ultiple perspectives is developed by explicitly documenting the effect s of design options on design features and the effects of design featu res on quality requirements. The techniques described by the framework are illustrated using a distributed order processing system.