Derivation of implementation constraints - implementation simulation and treatment of multiple design choices

The industrial use of ad hoc implementation methods for non-functional constrained tasks has resulted in unnecessary expensive projects. In some cases, ad hoc methods result in overly many iterations to be made and in some severe cases, total project breakdown. To be able to solve these problems a method has been developed to derive end-to-end non-functional constraints, such as timing requirements, to task-level constraints and to promote this information to the implementation phase of the project. For a tool, as the one described above, to be really useful it is important to be able to show that there is a potential cost reduction to be made. To be able to show that a certain implementation method costs less in work hours than to use an ad hoc implementation method, a model for implementation simulation with support for multiple implementation alternatives has been developed. The experiments show that using the budget based implementation method leads to a significant cost reduction in most cases, compared to the ad hoc method. As far as we know, no similar experiments have been done to compare implementation methods.