Conflict of requirements: a pattern for the treatment of conflicting non-functional requirements

Abstract

Software development is an activity that works several aspects of Software Engineering. One of them is requirements elicitation and its writing in an understandable notation for software developers. Non-Functional Requirements are those associated to the qualitative aspects of software such as performance, safety and usability. Normally the identification of non-functional requirements is conducted on an adhoc basis, and developed later. In this paper, a pattern is proposed for the treatment (identification and selection) of conflicting non-functional requirements in the early stages of its development, to not harm the quality of the system and also to be more suitable to customer needs.