Non-functional Requirements

This line of research seeks to provide modelling notations and tools for studying non-functional requirements. Non-functional requirements have only recently attracted the interest and attention of research and academic communities. Our work in this area focuses on goal-oriented analysis of global software qualities. Specifically, we investigate techniques for refining non-functional qualities in terms of established quality attributes in an effort to establish requirements for user interface engineering. A recent line of activity investigates universal accessibility and explores alternative context-oriented refinements in terms of established and new (or less established) quality attributes. This serves the purpose of understanding and gaining insight into the relationship between universal accessibility and portability, personalization, ubiquity, etc. A visual notation and an authoring tool have recently been developed allowing modeling of non-functional requirements and their specification using XML. The following examples provide some insight into the NfR-notation and tool.