Quality requirements analysis in customer-centered software development

An approach to nonfunctional requirements analysis for software systems is discussed. The approach is designed to refine and analyse quality requirements, to manage change and to stress customer acceptance. Our work is driven by the aim to develop a technology to enable and support customer-centered (cooperative) approaches to software development. We view quality requirements analysis essentially as an outcome of argumentation-based software design. Adopting this view, we support three claims: (1) the analysis of quality requirements is inherently intertwined in the conceptual software design process; (2) relationships among quality requirements hold in the context of a design decision for a local problem only; (3) priorities among competing requirements are sensitive to characteristics of the workplace