Capturing quality requirements of product family architecture

Software quality is one of the major issues with software intensive systems. Moreover, quality is a critical success factor in software product families exploiting shared architecture and common components in a set of products. Our contribution is the QRF (Quality Requirements of a software Family) method, which explicitly focuses on how quality requirements have to be defined, represented and transformed to architectural models. The method has been applied to two experiments; one in a laboratory environment and the other in industry. The use of the QRF method is exemplified by the Distribution Service Platform (DiSeP), the laboratory experiment. The lessons learned are also based on our experiences of applying the method in industrial settings.