Detail

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Using Catalogues to Elicit Non-Functional Requirements

Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) are subjective, interactive and
relative, thus realizing the need for particular NFR is by itself a
challenge. Furthermore understanding what the software must implement in
order to cope with these needs may prove to be an even more challenging
task. One way of addressing the need for help on NFR elicitation is the
use of catalogues. However, it is not clear how effective it is to use
them. This work investigates it through an empirical study where
different teams will model the same problem. We experimented for two
different modeling techniques, i* Framework and UML. For each technique
two teams used catalogues with a systematic method, another two teams
used catalogs in an ad hoc manner and yet another two teams did not use
catalogues. We show at the end of this work that teams using catalogues
performed significantly better.