Non-functional requirements (NFRs) are commonly distinguished from functional requirements by differentiating how the system shall do something in contrast to what the system shall do. This distinction is not only prevalent in research, but also influences how requirements are handled in practice. NFRs are usually documented separately from functional requirements, without quantitative measures, and with relatively vague descriptions. As a result, they remain difficult to analyze and test. Several authors argue, however, that many so-called NFRs actually describe behavioral properties and may be treated the same way as functional requirements. In this paper, we empirically investigate this point of view and aim to increase our understanding on the nature of NFRs addressing system properties. We report on the classification of 530 NFRs extracted from 11 industrial requirements specifications and analyze to which extent these NFRs describe system behavior. Our results suggest that most "non-functional" requirements are not non-functional as they describe behavior of a system. Consequently, we argue that many so-called NFRs can be handled similarly to functional requirements.
Previously published material. In our previously published paper @cite_4 , we presented a research proposal with the goal of analyzing natural language NFRs taken from industrial requirements specifications to better understand their nature. Our study reported here, relies on and extends our previous study design. We present the results in full detail, and provide a comprehensive discussion on the implications on software engineering disciplines.
@cite_4
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We present insights from a bibliometric analysis and scientific paper publication mining of 551 papers in Requirements Engineering (RE) series of conference (11 years from 2005 to 2015). We study cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary nature of RE re- search by analyzing the cited disciplines in the reference section of each paper. We apply topic modeling on a corpus consisting of 551 abstracts and extract topics as frequently co-occurring and connected terms. We use topic modeling to study the structure and composition of RE research and analyze popular topics in industry as well as research track. Co-authorship in papers is an indicator of collaboration and interaction between scientists as well as institutions and we analyze co-authorship data to in- vestigate university-industry collaboration, internal and external collaborations. We present results on the distribution of the num- ber of co-authors in each paper as well as distribution of authors across world regions. We present our analysis on the public or proprietary dataset as well as the domain of the dataset used in studies published in Requirements Engineering (RE) series of conferences.