Experience of pragmatically combining RE methods for performance requirements in industry

Abstract

To meet end-user performance expectations, precise performance requirements are needed during development and testing, e.g., to conduct detailed performance and load tests. However, in practice, several factors complicate performance requirements elicitation: lacking skills in performance requirements engineering, outdated or unavailable functional specifications and architecture models, the specification of the system's context, lack of experience to collect good performance requirements in an industrial setting with very limited time, etc. From the small set of available non-functional requirements engineering methods, no method exists that alone leads to precise and complete performance requirements with feasible effort and which has been reported to work in an industrial setting. In this paper, we present our experiences in combining existing requirements engineering methods into a performance requirements method called PROPRE. It has been designed to require no up-to-date system documentation and to be applicable with limited time and effort. We have successfully applied PROPRE in an industrial case study from the process automation domain. Our lessons learned show that the stakeholders gathered good performance requirements which now improve performance testing.

Agile elicitation of scalability requirements for open systems: A case study

“…However, performance testing is not applicable if you do not know the workload but would like to estimate the workload, as in our case. Wohlrab et al (2014), describe the PROPRE method for performance requirements engineering. This paper describes six interesting criteria for performance requirement engineering methods: (1) easy for all relevant stakeholders to understand, (2) include stakeholders in the process and encourage discussions, (3) help to focus on essential requirements to reduce time and effort, (4) result in a good basis for requirements' specification and the creation of test scenarios, (5) suitable in a distributed business scenario, in which it is hard to schedule meetings in which all stakeholders can participate, and (6) applicable under time constraints.…”

“…• It may be more representative so that it fits more systems. Wohlrab et al (2014), is a source of inspiration for extending the ScrumScale model.…”

Challenging Incompleteness of Performance Requirements by Sentence Patterns

“…Wohlrab et al [28] present their experiences in combining existing requirements elicitation and specification methods for performance requirements. They successfully applied the socalled PROPRE method to a large industrial project and report on the lessons learnt.…”