NFR-Assistant: tool support for achieving quality

Abstract

This paper presents the NFR-Assistant, a prototype CASE tool, which assists the software developer in systematically achieving quality requirements. The tool allows for explicit representation of non-functional requirements, consideration of design alternatives, analysis of design trade-offs, rationalization of a design choice and evaluation of the level of achievement of NFRs. As one of the first tools, the particular prototype presented in this paper is a Java applet rendition of a subset of the NFR-Assistant. The paper illustrates the use of the prototype for the development of an architectural design for no other than a distributed version of the NFR-Assistant itself.