The impacts of non-functional requirements in web system projects

In web system development, the Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs) are typically considered only briefly during the requirements elicitation stage and not rigorously articulated by either web developers or the client. This paper reports on an investigation into this issue involving interviews with web developers who were engaged in commercial web development projects. The results from this qualitative research highlight that web developers commonly do not pay sufficient attention to NFRs. This arises due to uncertainty, lack of time, lack of knowledge in the importance of NFRs and partly because NFRs are not readily available and documented from previous similar projects. Web developers also do not elicit NFR at the same time and at the same level of details as Functional Requirements (FRs). This study highlights that exploring the domain at an early stage of development will help developers to better understand NFR. A lack of rigour in articulating NFRs may significantly impact on the development effectiveness and the quality of the resulting web system. An evaluation of NFRs may also lead to discovering new FRs. © Copyright 2008, Inderscience Publishers

A Systematic Classification and Analysis of NFRs

The main agenda of Requirements Engineering (RE) is the development of tools, techniques and languages for the elicitation, specification, negotiation, and validation of software requirements. However, this development has traditionally been focused on functional requirements (FRs), rather than non-functional requirements (NFRs). Consequently, NFR approaches developed over the years have been fragmental and there is a lack of clear understanding of the positions of these approaches in the RE process. This paper provides a systematic classification and analysis of 89 NFR approaches

Performance Evaluation of Non Functional Requirements

Requirement engineering (RE) concerns goal identification by a system, operationalization of such goals into services and constraints, and assigning responsibilities, needs to agents including humans, devices/software. RE processes include negotiation, documentation, domain analysis, specification, elicitation, assessment, and evolution. It is difficult and critical to get high quality requirements. The paper gives a synopsis of the field of requirements engineering. RE is defined, and a brief history of main concepts and techniques is presented. The result got by using the method is very promising. It was evaluated extensively on Non Functional Requirements (NFR) dataset obtained from PROMISE repository, which is publicly accessible

Requirements reuse and requirement patterns: a state of the practice survey

Context. Requirements engineering is a discipline with numerous challenges to overcome. One of these challenges is the implementation of requirements reuse approaches. Although several theoretical proposals exist, little is known about the practices that are currently adopted in industry. Objective. Our goal is to contribute to the investigation of the state of the practice in the reuse of requirements, eliciting current practices from practitioners, and their opinions whenever appropriate. Besides reuse in general, we focus on requirement patterns as a particular strategy to reuse. Method. We conducted an exploratory survey based on an online questionnaire. We received 71 responses from requirements engineers with industrial experience in the field, which were analyzed in order to derive observations. Results. Although we found that a high majority of respondents declared some level of reuse in their projects (in particular, non-functional requirements were identified as the most similar and recurrent among projects), it is true that only a minority of them declared such reuse as a regular practice. Larger IT organizations and IT organizations with well-established software processes and methods present higher levels of reuse. Ignorance of reuse techniques and processes is the main reason preventing wider adoption. From the different existing reuse techniques, the simplest ones based on textual copy and subsequent tailoring of former requirements are the most adopted techniques. However, participants who apply reuse more often tend to use more elaborate techniques. Opinions of respondents about the use of requirement patterns show that they can be expected to mitigate problems related to the quality of the resulting requirements, such as lack of uniformity, inconsistency, or ambiguity. The main reasons behind the lack of adoption of requirement patterns by practitioners (in spite of the increasing research approaches proposed in the community) are related to the lack of a well-defined reuse method and involvement of requirement engineers.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Non-Functional Requirements Elicitation Guideline for Agile Methods

One of the essential activities in software development is elicitation of requirement. Majority of the studies has pointed out that less attention is given to the NonFunctional Requirement (NFR). The negligence of NFR elicitation is due to lack of knowledge of the user and developer about NFR. Our study presents elicitation guidelines for NFRs in agile methods. This guideline will helps developers as well as users in agile methods. A case study is conducted on the group of master students for eliciting NFR with the help of elicitation guidelines. In addition, the initial results were obtained by extracting NFRs from eProcurement document that carries requirements of major European Union projects. The result of the case study is positive and encouraging for the new developers and users having less awareness about NFRs. Furthermore, the study describes the role of cloud computing in agile methods, especially in elicitation activity

Exploring issues in agile requirements engineering in the South African industry

The agile manifesto has certainly changed the way software is produced in the Information Communications Technology (ICT) industry. However, many persistent challenges cripple agile software development. One challenge is that the constant change in technology makes the requirements hard to implement. Another is that issues of the agile requirements engineering (ARE) process are abundant and pervasive throughout software projects. The aim of this study is to determine common issues in agile requirements engineering in the South African software industry and identify tools and frameworks to mitigate risks emanating from such problems. This includes finding out how much value software practitioners put in the agile principles. This study was essentially quantitative, based on a cross-sectional survey. Self-administered questionnaires were used to collect required data which was then subjected to exploratory data analysis using SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences), a tool for statistical analysis. The results show that software practitioners have a strong penchant for principles of the Agile Manifesto. Major issues in agile requirements engineering include lack of proper validation tools and techniques, scope problems, lack of proper documentation, issues of prioritisation, as well as unavailability of customer representative. A detailed baseline of issues in agile requirements engineering was created along with a set of recommended tools and techniques used in the software industry. As for the recommendation, it is suggested that companies invest more on validation tools and techniques and consider non-functional requirements integration during software development.School of ComputingM. Sc. (Computing

RS4AAL: A Process for Specifying and Analyzing Non-Functional Requirements in Ambient Assisted Living Systems

Context: The increasing life expectancy of the world’s population is a reality, and combined with sharply declining birth rates, these advances in life expectancy could lead to a rapidly aging population around the world. Technologies such as Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) can provide services that enable older people to live independently, safely and healthily. During system development, it is important to ensure good specification of Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). These are requirements that define how the system will behave in certain situations and may impact the end goal of the software if not considered during the analysis and development of the project. Aims: To meet and identify all the needs and functions provided to the users of the system, this article provides a process for specifying and analyzing nonfunctional requirements in Ambient Assisted Living, called RS4AAL, which helps the requirements engineer to specify and analyze the important requirements in the development of this system by capturing the requirements with techniques such as storytelling, reuse, and legal requirements. Results: Based on systematic mapping, key nonfunctional requirements for the Health and Care in Life subdomain were identified, as well as some legal requirements that may impact system development. Conclusions: A key finding is that the personal context of older people, legal requirements such as ISO/PRF TS 823042, and AAL Guidelines for Ethics, Data Privacy and Security directly affect the specification of non-functional requirements and the design of systems. The RS4AAL helps with this mapping by showing the requirements engineer what to consider when designing AAL systems