A Case Study Evaluation of the Guideline-Supported QUPER Model for Elicitation of Quality Requirements

• For market-driven software product developing organizations operating on a competitive open market, it is important to plan the product's releases so that they can reach the market as early as possible with a competitive level of quality compared to its competitors' products. Hence, quality requirements can be seen as a key competitive advantage. The QUPER model was developed with the aim to support high-level decision-making in release planning of quality requirements. As a follow up on previous studies on QUPER, this study investigates: What are practitioners' views on the utilities of QUPER extended with guidelines including domain-specific examples? [Principal ideas/results] In the presented case study, a set of detailed guidelines of how to apply QUPER in practice, including how to handle cost dependencies between quality requirements, was evaluated at a case company in the mobile handset domain with 24 professionals using real quality requirements. The results point to the importance of having concrete guidelines combined with instructive examples from real practice, while it is not always obvious for a practitioner to transfer cost-dependency examples into the domains that are different from the example domain. The transferability of guidelines and examples to support methodology adoption is an interesting issue for further research.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Programvaruteknik (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Software Engineering (hsv//eng)

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap -- Datavetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences -- Computer Sciences (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Software engineering

Requirements engineering

Release planning

QUPER

Quality requirements

Empirical case study

QUPER

software engineering

requirements engineering

release planning

quality requirements

empirical case study

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kon (subject category)