Software Engineering Institute

This article was published in CrossTalk, 22, 3 (March/April 2009): 12–15.

For a large-scale system of systems (SoS), severe integration and run-time problems can arise due to inconsistencies, ambiguities, and gaps in how quality attributes (such as reliability) are addressed in the underlying systems. This is exacerbated in contexts where major system and software elements of the SoS are developed concurrently and oftentimes independently. Using a defense system scenario, this article outlines a uniform approach for capturing quality attribute requirements as augmentations to mission threads early in the development process and for analyzing SoS, system, and software architectures against these mission thread augmentations.