An industry experience report on managing product quality requirements in a large organization

Abstract

Context Eliciting, managing and implementing product quality requirements (in-short quality requirements) in a large organization can be challenging when many stakeholders are involved and projects run in parallel; sometimes with varying priorities with regards to quality. In this case from a public organization in Norway, the separation between business units and the IT-department and the legacy burden are additional factors that increase the complexity of requirement management. Objective This paper presents results and experiences from three years long work with quality requirements, starting from ad-hoc handling of quality requirements in separate projects to systematic work across projects with reusable sets of requirements and processes. Method We present how quality requirements are captured and classified, as well as changes to the agile software development process as a consequence of increasing focus on product quality. Results The ISO/IEC-25010:2011 standard is tailored for better context fit and is supported by concrete requirements and a methodology that covers the life cycle of software products in both greenfield and brownfield projects. In addition, the organization had to examine the current state of existing IT-capabilities in order to establish a quality baseline for future development, and develop shared vision and roadmaps for product quality. Conclusions In our experience, stakeholders prefer an iterative and lightweight approach in eliciting and refining quality requirements. The classification model and requirement lists are used as guidelines in requirement workshops. The developed terminology, updated templates and processes are reusable in projects and generalizable to different contexts, and are well adopted by the IT and business units.