Non-Functional Requirements, quality attributes, architecturally significant requirements, extra-functional requirements, or whatever you call them, are the main driving force behind the key design or development decisions in any large scale software-intensive system development.
It is widely recognized that quality attributes of a system largely depend on the overall architecture of such systems. Hence, it is important to pay significant attention to quality requirements for systematically designing and rigorously analyzing system and software architectures. Recently there has been enormous progress in terms of supportive methods, and tools for systematically eliciting, specifying, and representing the desired set of quality attributes, hence, it seems a good time to have a synthesis of the research and practice reporting methods, approaches, and tools to support quality attributes elicitation, specifications, and modelling for designing and evaluating software and system architectures. With goal in mind, Rafael, Oscar, and I will be editing a special of Requirements Engineering Journal (REJ) on this very special topic. Please read the call for your own interest and help us distributed it to the people who may have relevant work to submit.