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An Approach to Deal with Non-Functional Requirements within UML

An Approach to Deal with Non-Functional Requirements within UML
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Author(s): Guadalupe Salazar-Zarate (Technical University of Catalunya (UPC), Spain), Pere Botella (Technical University of Catalunya (UPC), Spain)and Ajantha Dahanayake (Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands)
Copyright: 2002
Pages: 3
Source title: Issues & Trends of Information Technology Management in Contemporary Organizations
Source Editor(s): Mehdi Khosrow-Pour, D.B.A. (Information Resources Management Association, USA)
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-930708-39-6.ch184
ISBN13: 9781930708396
EISBN13: 9781466641358

Abstract

This paper presents ongoing work on formulating a methodology to deal with the non-functional aspects of software systems. It is well-known that functional and non-functional requirements are both relevant to software development. It is intended that this methodology could be applied and integrated into the Unified Modeling Language (UML) [Booch98]. Nowadays, UML is a standard modeling language for software systems development [Object00]. Our proposal is to extend the UML language in order to include the elements for conceptual modeling and for visualizing the non-functional information in a similar manner as its counterparts, the functional information models. The specific objectives of this research are focused on the possibility of developing mechanisms to incorporate non-functional elements in the development of software systems and particularly in the extension of the UML language for integrating non-functional aspects. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: section 2 defines the concepts regarding non-functional aspects covered in the research, putting special attention on the standard that defines quality characteristics of software. Section 3 gives a glimpse on the possibilities for an extension of the UML language in order to include non-functionality and presents the methodology for dealing with non-functional requirements. Section 4 outlines some conclusions and future research.

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