Understanding Quality Requirements in the Context of Big Data Systems

While the domain of big data is anticipated to affect many aspects of human endeavour, there are numerous challenges in building big data applications among which is how to address big data characteristics in quality requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel, unified, approach for specifying big data characteristics (e. g., velocity of data arrival) in quality requirements (i. e., those requirements specifying attributes such as performance, reliability, availability, security, etc.). Several examples are given to illustrate the integrated specifications. As this is early work, further experimentation is needed in different big data situations and quality requirements and, beyond that, in a variety of project settings.