An engineering approach to integrate Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) to achieve high quality software process

Software quality calls for an engineering approach to incorporate non-functional requirements as first-class citizens into software specification and later operationalized at the development time. Recent research argues to model high level goals capturing the intentions of the users as Non-functional requirements (NFRs) at the early stage of the requirements engineering. However, intertwining relevant NFRs into the specification at early stage increases the complexity to many folds. Therefore, a straightforward approach for capturing NFRs is not possible as product specific NFRs are usually domain dependent. In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to integrate NFRs into the specification and development artifacts to ensure high quality of the software system under development. Considering existing seminal approaches in the literature, we propose a textual template for specifying NFRs and provide systematic technique to integrate relevant NFRs during the software requirements specification phase. We demonstrate our approach using a healthcare-information-systems as a case study and report initial results.