Identifying Quality-Requirement Conflicts

Without a well-de$ned set of quality-attribute FequiYemen ts, so&aye pmjects aye vulnerable to failure. The authors have developed QARCC, a knowledge-based too,? that helps users, developers, and customem analyze Yequivements and iden tzfi conflicts among them. IEEE SOFTWARE espite well-specified functional and interface requirements, many software projects have failed because they had a poor set of quality-attribute requirements. Finding the right balance of quality-attribute requirements is an important step in achieving successful software requirements and products. To do this, you must identify the conflicts among desired quality attributes and work out: a balance of attribute satisfaction. The importance of this balance can be seen in examples that failed to find it: + In the New Jersey Department of Motor Vehicles licensing system, engineers chose a fourth-generation language to satisfy software affordability and timeliness objectives, but the system failed because of performance-scalability problems. + The initial development of the National Library of Medicine MEDLARS II system had a plethora of layers and recursions for portability and evolvability, but was eventually