10 research outputs found
Technical debt and waste in non-functional requirements documentation:an exploratory study
Background: To adequately attend to non-functional requirements (NFRs), they
must be documented; otherwise, developers would not know about their existence.
However, the documentation of NFRs may be subject to Technical Debt and Waste,
as any other software artefact. Aims: The goal is to explore indicators of
potential Technical Debt and Waste in NFRs documentation. Method: Based on a
subset of data acquired from the most recent NaPiRE (Naming the Pain in
Requirements Engineering) survey, we calculate, for a standard set of NFR
types, how often respondents state they document a specific type of NFR when
they also state that it is important. This allows us to quantify the occurrence
of potential Technical Debt and Waste. Results: Based on 398 survey responses,
four NFR types (Maintainability, Reliability, Usability, and Performance) are
labelled as important but they are not documented by more than 22% of the
respondents. We interpret that these NFR types have a higher risk of Technical
Debt than other NFR types. Regarding Waste, 15% of the respondents state they
document NFRs related to Security and they do not consider it important.
Conclusions: There is a clear indication that there is a risk of Technical Debt
for a fixed set of NFRs since there is a lack of documentation of important
NFRs. The potential risk of incurring Waste is also present but to a lesser
extent