Framework for Identifying Meta-Requirements

Abstract

As motivated in the very first chapter, this book is an attempt to address the need for a software engineering method to bridge the gap between requirements engineering and software architecture with respect to quality requirements. This chapter identifies what is needed for such a method by 1) identifying the meta-requirements that such a method should fulfill and developing an evaluation framework based on the identified meta-requirements, 2) capturing the state-of-the-art in this area by conducting a systematic literature review and producing an overview of existing work, 3) analyzing the existing work by applying the evaluation framework. Our evaluation underlines the lack of systematic guidelines and methods for quality-aware development of requirements and software architecture. It shows that none of the existing methods fulfills all meta-requirements we identified before. In further chapters of this book, we describe our QuaDRA framework which addresses the gap identified in this chapter by providing a method supporting the development of requirements and software architecture with respect to quality requirements.