Continuously Managing NFRs: Opportunities and Challenges in Practice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Non-functional requirements (NFR), which include performance, availability, and maintainability, are vitally important to overall software quality. However, research has shown NFRs are, in practice, poorly defined and difficult to verify. Continuous software engineering practices, which extend agile practices, emphasize fast paced, automated, and rapid release of software that poses additional challenges to handling NFRs. In this multi-case study we empirically investigated how three organizations, for which NFRs are paramount to their business survival, manage NFRs in their continuous practices. We describe four practices these companies use to manage NFRs, such as offloading NFRs to cloud providers or the use of metrics and continuous monitoring, both of which enable almost real-time feedback on managing the NFRs. However, managing NFRs comes at a cost—as we also identified a number of challenges these organizations face while managing NFRs in their continuous software engineering practices. For example, the organizations in our study were able to realize an NFR by strategically and heavily investing in configuration management and infrastructure as code, in order to offload the responsibility of NFRs; however, this offloading implied potential loss of control. Our discussion and key research implications show the opportunities, trade-offs, and importance of the unique give-and-take relationship between continuous software engineering and NFRs. Research artifacts may be found athttps://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3376342.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.089 | 0.139 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.033 |
| Open science | 0.007 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".