An Exploratory Study About Non-functional Requirements Documentation Practices in Agile Teams

Several companies opt for agile methodologies to enable adjustments and changes to business requirements during the project. However, extensive focus on delivering features might result in a dearth of practices to manage non-functional requirements (NFRs), which often play a vital role in supporting the business. To investigate how agile teams face this issue, we performed a multiple case study with three companies. Our research aims to identify existing practices for NFRs management and verify if specific kinds of NFRs are handled differently. To collect data, we inspected the requirements documentation and conducted semi-structured interviews. As results, we identified five practices concerning NFR documentation. Furthermore, security and usability appeared more frequently than other kinds of NFR in the documentation we inspected. Companies might employ our results to make more informed decisions regarding practices they may use to manage NFRs.