Non-functional Requirements Elicitation

1. INTRODUCTION Software developers are constantly under pressure to deliver code on time and on budget. As a result, many projects focus on delivering functionalities at the expense of meeting non-functional requirements such as reliability, security, maintainability, portability, accuracy, among others. As software complexity grows and clients demand higher and higher quality software, non-functional properties can no longer be considered to be of secondary importance. Many systems fail or fall into disuse precisely because of inadequacies in these properties. These non-functional aspects have been treated as properties or attributes after the fact. While these properties have always been a concern among software engineering researchers, early work have tended to view them as properties or attributes of the finished software product to be evaluated and measured. Recent work offer the complementary view that they should be treated as requirements to be dealt with from the earliest stages of the software development process [6][7], and then throughout the entire life cycle.