Evaluating software developers' acceptance of a tool for supporting agile non-functional requirement elicitation

Abstract

Due to the need for flexibility to requirements changes, agile software development methods have been attracting the attention of academic and industrial domains. Unlike traditional approaches, agile methods focus on the rapid delivery of business value to customers through empirical and incremental development processes. Despite being effective in delivering quality functional requirements, agile practices generally neglect non-functional requirements until the later stages of software development. However, neglecting non-functional requirements during requirements analysis can lead to project failures. In this paper, we present the NFRec tool, which aims to support software developers in the elicitation of non-functional requirements in the context of agile software development. Additionally, we report the results from a case study to evaluate the acceptance of the NFRec tool from the point of view of software developers of four projects from a Brazilian software company. To gather information about the tool acceptance, we applied a questionnaire based on the indicators from the Technology Acceptance Model. Overall, the four teams considered the NFRec tool useful and easy to use for supporting the management of non-functional requirements in agile projects.