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Clarifying Non-functional Requirements to Improve User Acceptance – Experience at Siemens

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Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 5512))

Abstract

[Context and motivation] The starting point for software development is usually the system requirements. The requirements, especially nonfunctional requirements specified in a document are often incomplete and inconsistent with the initial user needs and expectations. [Question/problem] Experience at Siemens showed us that programmers working on software development often have trouble interpreting under-specified non-functional requirements, resulting in code that does not meet the users’ quality expectations and contains “quality faults” that can only be detected later through expensive user acceptance testing activities. [Principal ideas/results] In this problem statement paper, we investigate the need for clarifying non-functional requirements in software specifications to improve user acceptance. In particular we focus on establishing the role of non-functional requirements on user acceptance. [Contribution] Our contribution is that we emphasize the need for a systematic empirical study in this area. We propose a possible set-up where a number of hypotheses have been developed that a systematic experiment will help to validate. Our work is based on industrial experiments at Siemens, in the particular context of the installation of a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system.

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Marhold, C., Rohleder, C., Salinesi, C., Doerr, J. (2009). Clarifying Non-functional Requirements to Improve User Acceptance – Experience at Siemens. In: Glinz, M., Heymans, P. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5512. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02050-6_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-02050-6_12

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-02049-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-02050-6

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