A Case Study in Eliciting Scalability Requirements

Scalability is widely recognized as an important software quality, but it is a quality that historically has lacked a consistent and systematic treatment. To address this problem, we recently presented a framework for the characterization and analysis of software systems scalability. A key weakness of that initial work was that its quantitative analysis was based on arbitrarily defined variables and functions, which could compromise its results. This risk can be mitigated through a systematic exploration of system scalability goals and application domain during requirements engineering. This paper describes our application of goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE) for eliciting the scalability requirements of a large, real-world financial fraud detection system. The case study reveals both the suitability and the limitations of GORE as a technique for eliciting the information needed by stakeholders to specify scalability goals of a system. In the paper, we describe these findi...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: RE
• Authors: Leticia Duboc, Emmanuel Letier, David S. Rosenblum, Tony Wicks
• Keywords: RE 2008, Scalability, Scalability Goals, Scalability Requirements, Software Engineering