How do Software Architects Consider Non-functional Requirements: An Exploratory Study
Reviewed by Neil Ernst / 2012-11-06
Keywords: Requirements
Ameller2012 David Ameller, Claudia Ayala, Jordi Cabot, and Xavier Franch: "How do software architects consider non-functional requirements: An exploratory study". 2012 20th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE), 10.1109/re.2012.6345838.
Dealing with non-functional requirements (NFRs) has posed a challenge onto software engineers for many years. Over the years, many methods and techniques have been proposed to improve their elicitation, documentation, and validation. Knowing more about the state of the practice on these topics may benefit both practitioners' and researchers' daily work. A few empirical studies have been conducted in the past, but none under the perspective of software architects, in spite of the great influence that NFRs have on daily architects' practices. This paper presents some of the findings of an empirical study based on 13 interviews with software architects. It addresses questions such as: who decides the NFRs, what types of NFRs matter to architects, how are NFRs documented, and how are NFRs validated. The results are contextualized with existing previous w ork.
In this work, Ameller et al. consider the contention that NFRs ought to be driving concerns for software architects. They conducted a study with Spanish software architects in a variety of domains to understand how they thought of NFRs. Their first finding was that no one held a formal "architect" role, although that was what their work entailed. The job position was based on skills and knowledge rather than training. Their second finding was that NFRs were not of primary importance, which contradicts other research findings. Instead, they found it was more important to consider project-wide constraints like licencing and overall cost. This suggests some interesting directions for new research in the role architecture plays in the software development process.
A related blog post with more detail can be found here.