Towards a Framework for Specifying Software Robustness Requirements Based on Patterns

Paper in proceeding, 2010

[Context and motivation] With increasing use of software, quality attributes grow in relative importance. Robustness is a software quality attribute that has not received enough attention in requirements engineering even though it is essential, in particular for embedded and real-time systems. [Question/Problem] A lack of structured methods on how to specify robustness requirements generally has resulted in incomplete specification and verification of this attribute and thus potentially a lower quality. Currently, the quality of robustness specification is mainly dependent on stakeholder experience and varies wildly between companies and projects. [Principal idea/results] Methods targeting other non-functional properties such as safety and performance suggest that certain patterns occur in specification of requirements, regardless of project and company context. Our initial analysis with industrial partners suggests robustness requirements from different projects and contexts, if specified at all, follow the same rule. [Contribution] By identifying and gathering these commonalities into patterns we present a framework, ROAST, for specification of robustness requirements. ROAST gives clear guidelines on how to elicit and benchmark robustness requirements for software on different levels of abstraction.