Identification, specification and measurement, using international standards, of the system non functional requirements allocated to realtime embedded software

Abstract

During the system requirements phase, the focus is often on the functional requirements of the system, while non-functional requirements (NFR) are captured by system analysts at a very global level only: in this system analysis phase, these NFR are typically described at the system level and not at the software level. Detailing these NFR is typically left to be handled (i.e., defined at the necessary level of detail) much later by system designers in the system architecture and design phases. As yet, there is no consensus on how to describe and measure the system non-functional requirements (system-NFR); it is therefore challenging to take them into account in software project estimation and software project productivity benchmarking. In the software requirements engineering step, the system-NFR can be detailed and specified as software functional user requirements (software-FUR), to allow a software engineer to develop, test, and configure the final deliverables to the system users. The research project motivation is to contribute to the improvement of the estimation models of software development effort by including the system-NFR in the software estimation process through a quantitative view of such NFR. The goal for this research project is to help project managers, organizations, and researchers to make informed decisions on project planning and software development projects in the early identification, specification, and measurement of the system-NFR for the embedded software. More specifically, this research project aims at contributing to better define, describe, and measure the system-NFR allocated to software-FUR for real time and embedded software. The research objective is the early specification and measurement of software-FUR derived from system-NFR, using as a basis the systems and software engineering standards. To achieve this research objective the following two specific research sub-objectives must be reached: • Designs of standard-based generic models for the identification and specification of software-FUR for system-NFR; • Measurement of the functional size of software-FUR for system-NFR using the COSMIC ISO 19761 standard. The results of this research will be a set of standard-based specification and measurement models for system-NFR for real-time embedded software. The main outcome of this research study is the set of fourteen (14) standard-based models of software-FUR for the early identification, specification, and measurement of system nonfunctional requirements allocated to software.

Date	23 Aug 2011
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Alain Abran (Supervisor)