Paper Info
Title
Are "non-functional" requirements really non-functional?: an investigation of non-functional requirements in practice.
Abstract
Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are commonly distinguished from functional requirements by differentiating how the system shall do something in contrast to what the system shall do. This distinction is not only prevalent in research, but also influences how requirements are handled in practice. NFRs are usually documented separately from functional requirements, without quantitative measures, and with relatively vague descriptions. As a result, they remain difficult to analyze and test. Several authors argue, however, that many so-called NFRs actually describe behavioral properties and may be treated the same way as functional requirements. In this paper, we empirically investigate this point of view and aim to increase our understanding on the nature of NFRs addressing system properties. We report on the classification of 530 NFRs extracted from 11 industrial requirements specifications and analyze to which extent these NFRs describe system behavior. Our results suggest that most \"non-functional\" requirements are not non-functional as they describe behavior of a system. Consequently, we argue that many so-called NFRs can be handled similarly to functional requirements.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2884781.2884788
ICSE
Keywords
Field
DocType
Non-functional requirements, classification, model-based development, empirical studies
Functional requirement,Systems engineering,Software engineering,Computer science,Requirements analysis,Requirements elicitation,Requirements management,Software requirements specification,Functional specification,Non-functional requirement,Non-functional testing
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
0270-5257
978-1-5090-2071-3
12
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.63
20
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Jonas Eckhardt1969.24
Andreas Vogelsang28331.23
Daniel Méndez Fernández331234.66