Technical Debt and Waste in Non-functional Requirements Documentation: An Exploratory Study

• Published in: Product-Focused Software Process Improvement Vol. 11915; pp. 220 - 235
• Main Authors: Robiolo, Gabriela, Scott, Ezequiel, Matalonga, Santiago, Felderer, Michael
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2019; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Non functional requirements; Technical Debt; Waste
• ISBN: 303035332X; 9783030353322
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-35333-9_16

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.