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

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Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2015)

Abstract

[Context & motivation] 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. [Question/problem] 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. [Contribution] 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.

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Berntsson Svensson, R., Regnell, B. (2015). A Case Study Evaluation of the Guideline-Supported QUPER Model for Elicitation of Quality Requirements. In: Fricker, S., Schneider, K. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9013. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16101-3_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16101-3_15

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