Tailoring Stakeholder Interests to Task-Oriented Functional Requirements

TL;DR

This paper introduces a task analytic approach that links stakeholder interests to user tasks, improving the specification and understanding of non-functional requirements in software development.

Contribution

It proposes a structured method to tailor non-functional requirements based on stakeholder interests by modeling them as constraints on user tasks, enhancing clarity and impact analysis.

Findings

Increases comprehensibility of non-functional requirements.

Shows improved understanding of stakeholder interests.

Demonstrates practical applicability through a case study.

Abstract

Without a specific functional context, non-functional requirements can only be approached as cross-cutting concerns and treated uniformly across all features of an application. This neglects, however, the heterogeneity of non-functional requirements that arises from stakeholder interests and the distinct functional scopes of software systems, which mutually influence how these non-functional requirements have to be satisfied. Earlier studies showed that the different types and objectives of non-functional requirements result in either vague or unbalanced specification of non-functional requirements. We propose a task analytic approach for eliciting and modeling user tasks to approach the stakeholders' pursued interests towards the software product. Stakeholder interests are structurally related to user tasks and each interest can be specified individually as a constraint of a specific user task. These constraints support DevOps teams with important guidance on how the interest of the stakeholder can be satisfied in the software lifecycle sufficiently. We propose a structured approach, intertwining task-oriented functional requirements with non-functional stakeholder interests to specify constraints on the level of user tasks. We also present results of a case study with domain experts, which reveals that our task modeling and interest-tailoring method increases the comprehensibility of non-functional requirements as well as their impact on the functional requirements, i.e., the users' tasks.