Supporting Non-Functional Requirements Elicitation with Templates
Pozna´nUniversity of Technology Institute of Computing Science SUPPORTING NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS ELICITATION WITH TEMPLATES Sylwia Kopczy´nska A dissertation submitted to the Council of the Faculty of Computing in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Supervisor Jerzy Nawrocki, PhD, Dr Habil. Auxiliary supervisor Mirosław Ochodek, PhD Pozna´n,Poland 2018 ABSTRACT Non-functional requirements (NFRs) state conditions under which functionality is useful (they concern perfor- mance, security, availability, etc.). Unfortunately, they are frequently neglected, especially those NFRs that are difficult to write or seem ostensibly obvious. Such behavior is an important risk factor in software projects as, in many cases, improper management of NFRs is one of the root causes of project failures. One of the approaches to support elicitation of NFRs is using a catalog of templates. Templates are natural lan- guage statements with some parameters (gaps) to fill in and optional parts to select during elicitation. Many authors say that templates improve consistency and testability of requirements, and that they reduce am- biguity. Although experts formulate these claims, some recent studies show that practitioners are afraid of using NFR templates in their projects. It is not clear for them what are the benefits and costs of using NFR templates. In the traditional approaches to software development, the necessity to elicit NFRs seemed rather obvious. Re- cently, agile approaches have gained popularity but it would be vain to look for agile practices that explicitly refer to NFRs. Therefore, a question arises whether NFRs are still important. Another issue is user feedback left in online app stores.
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