An empirical study on the importance of quality requirements in industry

Abstract

Quality requirements can constrain many aspects of a software system and have a strong influence on its success. Therefore, they play a major role in the development of any software system. As software systems are designed to achieve various goals and perform different functions, the order of importance of quality requirements may vary depending on these goals and functions. Within this context, this paper aims to gain new insights into how industry deals with quality requirements. More specifically, its purpose is to analyze the importance of different types of quality requirements. An empirical study has been performed in order to determine practitioners’ perspectives on this issue. The paper reports on a survey in which product managers, project leaders and programmers with different backgrounds have participated. Consequently, the paper provides further evidence about the perceived importance of types of quality requirements and how the importance may be different depending on the practitioners’ roles, the types of project, the orders of magnitude of the requirements or the application domains. Keywordsrequirements engineering, empirical study, survey, quality requirement, non-functional requirement, industry.