Managing non‐functional requirements in agile software development

Abstract

Non-functional requirements define qualities of the software system that ensure effectiveness while embedding any constraints and restrictions on the design. A challenge rises with agile implementation in handling non-function requirements in regulated environments. Thus, a practitioner's perceptions of agile method tailoring are described in relation to inter-team boundaries and non-functional requirements. The research comprises 18 practitioner interviews from two multinational agile software development companies. Interviews were recorded, transcribed, and analysed using an approach informed by grounded theory and information flow models were used to compare and contrast interactions of processes. It was discovered that one of the case study companies managed non-functional requirements as artefacts in their agile methodology, while the other company reverts to conventional plan-based software development practices of documentation, timeline estimations, and safety critical requirements. This research creates a detailed comparison of these contrasting approaches. The main contribution of this study is a set of proposed recommendations to deal with non-functional requirements in a regulated environment using agile techniques. The introduction of two new artefacts, Documentation Work Item and Safety Critical Work Item, is recommended and it is accompanied with an illustrative example, to transform the handling of documentation and safety critical requirements in a more agile way. K E Y W O R D Ssoftware development management, software engineering | INTRODUCTIONSoftware development has become an integral part of our current globalised world. Since the creation of the agile manifesto in 2001, agile software development has been growing vertically within organisations and horizontally across organisations in different business sectors. Initially, agile methods were viewed as best suited for small projects with co-located teams [1]. With the increasing spread of agile methods, largescale organisations started implementing agile methods [2,3]. This implementation was associated with agile methods tailoring to fit large-scale organisations [4,5].A set of agile principles was introduced to the software development industry in the Agile Manifesto. Agile methods enhance customer involvement in the development process by encouraging regular customer feedback and its prioritisation [6]. Conventionally, agile methods are comprised of ceremonies, artefacts, and roles.Inter-team communication in agile has been identified as an important topic for researchers [7,8] and refers to communication between teams in the same company. The right combination of communication mechanisms improves agile implementation while a mismatch may be an impediment [9]. Inter-dependent teams are highly reliant on team This manuscript is submitted to IET Software and is not under consideration for publication anywhere else. Thank you for your consideration! This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommerc...

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