A Broad, Quantitative Model for Making Early Requirements Decisions

Although detailed information is typically scarce during a project's early phases, developers frequently need to make key decisions about trade-offs among quality requirements. Developers in many fields-including systems, hardware, and software engineering-routinely make such decisions on the basis of a shallow of the situation or on past experience, which might be irrelevant to the current a consequence, developers can get locked into what is ultimately an inferior design or pay a significant price to reverse such earlier decisions later in the process. By coarsely quantifying relevant factors, a risk-assessment model helps hardware and software engineers make trade-offs among quality requirements early in development.