An Ontological Interpretation of Non-Functional Requirements

Abstract. Non-functional requirements (NFRs) have been the focus of research in Requirements Engineering (RE) for more than 20 years. Despite this attention, their ontological nature is still an open question, thereby hampering efforts to de-velop concepts, tools and techniques for eliciting, modeling, and analyzing them, in order to produce a specification for a system-to-be. In this paper, we propose to treat NFRs as qualities, based on definitions of the UFO foundational ontology. Furthermore, based on these ontological definitions, we provide guidelines for dis-tinguishing between non-functional and functional requirements, and sketch a syn-tax of a specification language that can be used for capturing NFRs