Processes and Models for Capacity Requirements in Telecommunication Systems

Sammanfattning: Capacity is an essential quality factor in telecommunication systems. The ability to develop systems with the lowest cost per subscriber and transaction, that also meet the highest availability requirements and at the same time allow for scalability, is a true challenge for a telecommunication systems provider. This thesis describes a research collaboration between Linköping University and Ericsson AB aimed at improving the management, representation, and implementation of capacity requirements in large-scale software engineering.An industrial case study on non-functional requirements in general was conducted to provide the explorative research background, and a richer understanding of identified difficulties was gained by dedicating subsequent investigations to capacity. A best practice inventory within Ericsson regarding the management of capacity requirements and their refinement into design and implementation was carried out. It revealed that capacity requirements crosscut most of the development process and the system lifecycle, thus widening the research context considerably. The interview series resulted in the specification of 19 capacity sub-processes; these were represented as a method plug-in to the OpenUP software development process in order to construct a coherent package of knowledge as well as to communicate the results. They also provide the basis of an empirically grounded anatomy which has been validated in a focus group. The anatomy enables the assessment and stepwise improvement of an organization’s ability to develop for capacity, thus keeping the initial cost low. Moreover, the notion of capacity is discussed and a pragmatic approach for how to support model-based, function-oriented development with capacity information by its annotation in UML models is presented. The results combine into a method for how to improve the treatment of capacity requirements in large-scale software systems.