Visualizing the Impact of 4on-Functional Requirements on Variants : A Case Study

Developers must seriously address non-functional requirements (Quality of Service) in the production of software families that include variants for different customers. Most prior research in this area deals with design and implementation aspects such as mechanisms that help implement the variability in software architecture. Few researchers have addressed how to represent variability in non-functional requirements. Many representation models lack clarity in representing variants and explaining how nonfunctional requirements impact on them. We adopted the map model that represents variants clearly and we developed a way to visualize impact of non-functional requirements on variants. We propose in this paper a goal-driven approach of variability representation that captures the variability at both functional and nonfunctional requirements level.