Putting requirement management into praxis: dealing with nonfunctional requirements

Sound requirement management is the single most relevant technique to ensure that the need to provide customer-oriented solutions in a defined timeframe with limited budget can be matched with future safe evolution of system families. The last objective is especially closely related to nonfunctional requirements, We will show in this paper how requirement management for nonfunctional requirements is put into practice, thus integrating and exemplifying different key elements of requirement management, namely specification, conflict resolution, requirement tracing and progress tracking. Various practical examples are provided from the application of these techniques to development of telecommunication systems within Alcatel. The aspects of maintainability or reliability are naturally discussed as such systems are built on re-used components. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.