Crosscutting quality attributes for requirements engineering

Quality attributes are usually integrated with functional requirements at the later stages of the software development process. One of the reasons is that the current approaches fail in dealing with the crosscutting nature of some of those attributes, i.e. it is difficult to represent clearly how these attributes can affect several requirements simultaneously. Since this integration is not supported from requirements to the implementation, some of the software engineering principles, such as abstraction, localization, modularisation, uniformity and reusability, can be compromised. What we propose is a model to identify and specify quality attributes that crosscut requirements including their systematic integration into the functional description at an early stage of the software development process, i.e. at the requirements stage.