Handling nonfunctional and conflicting requirements with design patterns

In recent years, the influences of design patterns on software quality have attracted an increasing attention in the area of software engineering, as design patterns encapsulate valuable knowledge to resolve design problems, and more importantly to improve the design quality. One of the key challenges in object-oriented design is how to apply appropriate design patterns for addressing various design problems. In this paper, a design pattern is analyzed from quality and tradeoff perspectives for investigating its capability on handling nonfunctional and conflicting requirements. Based on the analysis, the application of design patterns is integrated with a goal-driven approach to guiding developers in constructing the object-oriented design model systematically. The major benefit of our approach is to provide a pattern-aided approach to handling the nonfunctional requirements and to assisting the resolution of conflicting requirements.