It executes compliance checks according to policies that have been specified. We have implemented a considerable part of the European Space Agency's software engineering standard using the environment prototype. With our industrial collaborator QSS Ltd., we are now working towards an efficient and stable environment that can be deployed in production processes. We intend to collaborate with various customers of QSS who have expressed an interest to evaluate the environment. The process of developing a software system starts with a requirements engineering stage where functional and non-functional requirements of the system are identified.
Functional requirements determine the services that a system is supposed to provide.
Non-functional requirements describe the quality of service that is expected from the system. These include fault tolerance, response time constraints,behaviour of the system under varying load patterns, the degree of data security it provides and so on. A lot of software engineering research has been devoted to the specification of functional requirements, by contrast non-functional requirements have not received systematic attention. There is a considerable industrial need for a better understanding of non-functional requirements specification. By a process of adaptation and refinement architectural styles are transformed into system specific software architectures.