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Soft goal

In connection with modeling languages and especially with goal-oriented modeling, a soft goal is an objective without clear-cut criteria. Soft goals can represent:

  • Non-functional requirements
  • Relations between non-functional requirements Non-functional requirements (or quality attributes, qualities, or more colloquially "-ilities") are global qualities of a software system, such as flexibility, maintainability, usability, and so forth. Such requirements are usually stated only informally; and they are often controversial (i.e. management wants a secure system but staff desires user-friendliness). They are also often difficult to validate.

Why ''soft''?

Normally a goal is a very strict and clear logical criterion. It is satisfied when all sub-goals are satisfied. But in non-functional requirements you often need more loosely defined criteria, like satisficeable or unsatisficeable. The term satisficing was first coined by Herbert Simon. Soft goals are goals that do not have a clear-cut criterion for their satisfaction: they are satisficed when there is sufficient positive and little negative evidence for this claim, while they are unsatisficeable in the opposite case.

Relations between soft goals

  • Decompositions
    • AND
    • OR
  • Contributions
    • Helps (+)
    • Hurts (-)
    • Makes (++)
    • Breaks (--)
    • Unknown

References

References

  1. S-Cube Knowledge Model: [http://www.s-cube-network.eu/km/terms/s/soft-goal Soft Goals]
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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