Method of non-functional requirements balancing during service development

Today, the list of telecom services, their functionality and requirements for Service Execution Environment (SEE) are changing extremely fast. Especially when it concerns requirements for charging as they have a high influence on business. This results in the need for constant adaptation and reconfiguration of Online Charging System (OCS) used in mobile operator networks. Moreover any new functionality requested from a service can have an impact on system behavior (performance, response time, delays) which are in general nonfunctional requirements. Currently, this influence and reconfiguration strategies are poorly formalized and validated. Current state-of-the-art approaches are considered methodologies that can model non-functional or functional requirements but these approaches don’t take into account interaction between functional and nonfunctional requirements and collaboration between services. All these result in time and money consuming service development and testing, and cause delays during service deployment. The balancing method proposed in this paper fills this gap. It employs a well-defined workflow with predefined stages for development and deployment process for OCS. The applicability of this novel approach is described in a separate section which contains an example of GPRS service charging. A tool, based on this method will be developed, providing automation of service functionality influence on non-functional requirements and allowing to provide a target deployment model for a particular customer. The reduction of development time and thus necessary financial input has been proved based on real-world experiments.