Good Practice and Improvement Model of Handling Capacity Requirements of Large Telecommunication Systems

There is evidence to suggest that the software industry has not yet matured as regards management of nonfunctional requirements (NFRs). Consequently the cost of achieving required quality is unnecessarily high. To try and avoid this, the telecommunication systems provider Ericsson defined a research task to try and improve the management of requirements for capacity, which is one of the most critical NFRs. Linköping University joined in the effort and conducted an interview series to investigate good practice within different parts of the company. Inspired by the interviews and an ongoing process improvement project a model for improvement was created and activities were synthesized. This paper contributes the results from the interview series, and details the subprocesses of specification that should be improved. Such improvements are about understanding the relationship between numerical entities at all system levels, augmenting UML specifications to make NFRs visible, working with time budgets, and testing the sub system level components on the same level as they are specified.