Non-functional Requirements Documentation Techniques in Agile Software Development: A Focus Group Study

Non-functional requirements are an essential part of any IT project, including agile projects. Addressing these requirements is a well-known challenge of agile projects because the common documentation techniques used in agile projects may be insufficient. This study examines which non-functional requirements documentation techniques industry practitioners working on agile projects use in different contexts. To this end, we conducted a literature review to identify documentation techniques proposed for agile projects. Based on the results, we organized focus groups with industry practitioners to determine when and to what extent they use these techniques in their projects. These were followed by a validation interview with a domain expert. We present our findings in the form of a list of recommendations. The list includes the conditions under which a given technique can be selected.