Non Functional Requirements Assessment and Traceability in Multimedia Educational Software

One of the challenges faced by the developers of current Multimedia Educational Software (MES) is the assessment of MES to meet users’ requirements. Non Functional Requirements (NFR) are key users’ requirements, because unlike functional requirements, which set out services expected by system, NFRs set out the constraints of the system and the process standards to be followed. Therefore, they play a key role in assessing the quality of MES. Quality Engineering is a new paradigm playing a crucial role in the European market of Services and Applications. In this field the assessment of Non Functional Requirements (NFRs) is underlined as an important step to have time-to-market products satisfying the quality and user needs. We aim to define a methodology and a representation of NFRs for assessment and traceability management. We have developed a scheme for representing critical NFRs, and applied it to the domains of MES for validation. Our approach extends the model for the representation of design rationale by making the evaluation goals explicit and providing the means to improve the quality of MES. Further research is how to relate NFRs to architectures. Keywords— Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs), Multimedia Educational Software (MES), system architectures.