Non-Functional Requirements in Industry - Three Case Studies Adopting an Experience-based NFR Method

  • Authors:
  • Joerg Doerr;Daniel Kerkow;Tom Koenig;Thomas Olsson;Takeshi Suzuki

  • Affiliations:
  • Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering;Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering;Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering;Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering;Ricoh Co. Ltd.

  • Venue:
  • RE '05 Proceedings of the 13th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Non-functional characteristics of products can be essential for business success and are a key differentiator between a company and its competitors. This paper presents the application of a systematic, experience-based method to elicit, document, and analyze non-functional requirements. The objective of the method is to achieve a minimal and sufficient set of measurable and traceable non-functional requirements. The method gives clear guidance for the requirements elicitation, using workshops for capturing the important quality aspects and eliciting the non-functional requirements. This paper shows its application in three different settings, reporting the experience and lessons learned from industrial case studies that applied our NFR method. As the case studies were applied in different domains and performed with companies of various maturity, and since different quality attributes were considered, a set of interesting results has emerged. Therefore, each case study tells its own story about how the elicitation of NFR in industry can work. The paper discusses the different settings and gives a comparison of the different lessons we learned from the case studies.