A Case Study in Eliciting Scalability Requirements

Abstract

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. That initial work did not provide means to instantiate the variables and functions to be used in the analysis, which could compromise its results. This risk can be mitigated through a systematic exploration of system scalability goals in the 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 findings in detail and chart a course for future research in extending goal-oriented techniques to scalability requirements.

A formal approach to verify software scalability requirements using set theory and Hoare triple

“…Earlier, scalability as a requirement was overlooked while developing software systems for lack of techniques for eliciting and testing scalability requirements [7]. Most of the works focused on building framework for scalability.…”

“…Although several works have been done on scalability framework and evaluation method [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], it is hard to find a significant work that specifically focuses on verifying scalability from the code level. State of the art works focus on architectural and design aspect [4], prediction of resources to make the system scalable [5] and scalability elicitation and analysis in requirement engineering phase [7], [6], [8].…”

“…State of the art works focus on architectural and design aspect [4], prediction of resources to make the system scalable [5] and scalability elicitation and analysis in requirement engineering phase [7], [6], [8]. However, it is arguable that existing works can be used to verify that whether the code can scale and impose the strictness regarding the implication of scalability.…”

Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering for Non-functional Factors

“…Define the Scalability as "Ability of a system to maintain the satisfaction of its quality goals to levels that are acceptable to its stakeholders when characteristics of the execution environment ("the world") and design ("the machine") vary over expected ranges" [7].…”

“…The following are the difficulties in applying GORE for eliciting requirements [7]. 1) Handling ranges and thresholds in the application domain.…”