Hoang, Thi Thuy Hang
[UCL]
(eng)
In the modern world, where most activities are computerized, ill-built software could result in disasters. Major flaws keep being spotted in software for space rockets, train schedulers, bank transactions, internet services, etc. In many cases, integrated information systems, although built with a “complete” set of required functions, still do not work adequately in certain circumstances. Such reality forces software developers to widen their focus beyond just functionality and to more effectively take into account quality concerns like security, availability, accuracy, etc. Many research results as well as practical techniques have been introduced, but there are still many areas where existing solutions are not effective enough.
This thesis addresses issues about improving the treatment of quality concerns in the context of multi-agent systems and of goal-based requirements engineering. The originality of our approach relies on a new definition of quality requirements that are presented as constraints bearing on the classical concepts of hard-goals and soft-goals. We extend the goal decomposition tree with a new node type for quality requirement and three new link types: elicitation, qualification, and contribution. High-level business goals (hard-goals and soft-goals) at root nodes are decomposed into lower-lever system hard-goals, at leaf nodes, possibly constrained by some elicited quality requirements. Quality requirements that have not been taken care of in this decomposition process can be controlled at system runtime through a catalogue of design patterns for quality control that we propose in this thesis.
Our goal decomposition with quality requirements and our catalogue of social patterns are applied (1) to extend the Tropos methodology into Quality-aware Tropos, (2) to build a supporting tool for Quality requirement (QCase), and (3) to develop an illustrative case study for improving the availability and customizability of a printing service.
Bibliographic reference |
Hoang, Thi Thuy Hang. Quality-aware agent-oriented information-system development . Prom. : Kolp, Manuel |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/68789 |