P. Haindl, R. Plösch, C. Körner: A Research Preview on TAICOS - Tailoring Stakeholder Interests to Task-Oriented Functional Requirements, 25th International Working Conference on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2019), March 18-21, Essen, Germany, Springer, 2019. Doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-15538-4_22


Without a concrete functional context, non-functional requirements can be approached only as crosscutting concerns and treated uniformly across the feature set 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. [Question/problem] Earlier studies have shown that the di fferent types and pursued objectives of nonfunctional requirements result in either vague or unbalanced specification of non-functional requirements. [Principal ideas/results] We propose a task analytic approach for eliciting and modeling user tasks with the software product. Stakeholder interests are structurally related to these user tasks and refined individually as a constraint in the context of each concrete user task. This individual refinement provides DevOps teams with important guidance on how the respective constraint can be satisfied in the software lifecycle and thus how the interest of the stakeholder can be satisfi ed suciently. [Contribution] We provide a structured approach, intertwining task-centered functional requirements with nonfunctional stakeholder interests to specify constraints on the level of user tasks. The results of a preliminary interview study with domain experts reveal that our task-constraint tailoring method increases the comprehensibility of requirements, clarity and quality of specifications.

A Research Preview on TAICOS – Tailoring Stakeholder Interests to Task-Oriented Functional Requirements