Improving Performance Requirements Specifications from Field Failure Reports

Customer-reported field failures provide valuable information for the requirements of the next release. Without a systematic approach, the requirements of the next release may not address the field failures, and the same problems may reoccur. In this paper, we propose a procedure for improving performance requirements based on a retrospective analysis of field failures reports and original requirements. In our procedure, the performance information from field failure reports and original requirements specifications is extracted based on a performance meta-model. The extracted information is used to construct new and revised performance requirements, following the performance refinement and evolution model. We applied this procedure on the requirements specifications and field failure reports for a commercial distributed software system. The results from our case study demonstrate that the resulting requirements integrate the information found in the field failure reports.