Abstract
Context:Agile software development (ASD) promotes minimal documentation and often prioritizes functional requirements over quality requirements (QRs). The minimal documentation emphasis may be beneficial in reducing time-to-market for software. However, it can also be a concern, especially with QRs, since they are challenging to specify and document and are crucial for software success. Therefore, understanding how practitioners perceive the importance of QR documentation is valuable because it can provide insight into how they approach this task. It also helps in developing models and guidelines that support the documentation of QRs in ASD, which is a research gap. Objective:We aim to understand practitioners’ perceptions of QR documentation and factors influencing this task to derive a model that supports optimal QR documentation in ASD. Method:We conducted a multiple case study involving 12 participants from three cases that apply ASD. Results:Practitioners identify QR documentation as important and perceive it as contributing to ensuring quality, clarifying QRs, and facilitating decision-making. Time constraints, QR awareness, and communication gaps affect QR documentation. Missing and outdated QR documentation may lead to technical debt and a lack of common understanding regarding QRs. We introduce a model to support optimal QR documentation in ASD by focusing on the factors: time constraints, QR awareness, and communication gaps. The model provides a representation and explanation of the factors affecting QR documentation in ASD and identifies mitigation strategies to overcome issues that may occur due to these factors. Conclusion:The study reveals the importance of documenting QRs in ASD. It introduces a model that is based on empirical knowledge of QR documentation practices in ASD. Both practitioners and researchers can potentially benefit from the model. For instance, practitioners can analyze how time constraints or QR awareness affect documentation, see potential issues that may arise from them, and utilize strategies suggested by the model to address these issues. Researchers can learn about QR documentation in ASD and utilize the model to understand the topic. They can also use the study as a baseline to investigate the topic with other cases.
Highlights
Agile software development (ASD) has been broadly adopted to meet the demands of dynamic business environments, where✩ Editor: Raffaela Mirandola.developed, such as reliability, security, performance, usability and maintainability (Wiegers and Beatty, 2013)
We used knowledge driven from this investigation and prior work on quality requirements (QRs) documentation practices with the aforementioned three cases and a review of the literature of management of QRs in ASD (Behutiye et al, 2020a,c) to propose a model, which is the main contribution of this paper
We found that practitioners identify documenting QRs as important to ensure software quality, clarify QRs, enforce process conformance on QRs, and enhance decision-making, as well as because QRs influence the implementation of other features
Summary
Agile software development (ASD) has been broadly adopted to meet the demands of dynamic business environments, where✩ Editor: Raffaela Mirandola.developed, such as reliability, security, performance, usability and maintainability (Wiegers and Beatty, 2013). We are interested in these factors since they reportedly affect the documentation and management of QRs in ASD (Behutiye et al, 2020a; Sachdeva and Chung, 2017) Examining such aspects can create knowledge that helps us better understand QR documentation in ASD. This is important since the existing models and guidelines focused on documentation tend to overlook some factors, such as issues that arise from communication gaps, time constraints, and QR awareness, or only focus on specific QRs, such as performance and security. According to Voigt et al (2016), strategies are needed to support documentation in ASD
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