Capturing, eliciting, predicting and prioritizing (CEPP) non-functional requirements metadata during the early stages of agile software development

Agile software engineering has been a popular methodology to develop software rapidly and efficiently. However, this methodology often considers Functional Requirements (FRs) due to the nature of agile software development and strongly neglects Non-Functional Requirements (NFRs). Neglecting NFRs has negative impacts on software products that have resulted in poor quality and higher cost to fix problems in later stages of software development. This research proposes a study to effectively gather NFRs metadata from software requirement artifacts such as documents and images. This will be accomplished by reducing false positives to include NFRs in the early stages of software requirements gathering along with FRs. In addition, this study will use historical trending to predict additional NFRs that are overlooked by architects and can be included along with FRs in the early stages of agile software development. Furthermore, prioritization of NFRs using existing FRs methodologies is important to stakeholders as well as software engineers in delivering quality software. This research builds on prior studies by specifically focusing on NFRs during the early stages of agile software development. The goal of this study is to improve upon prior studies of NFRs in order to provide effective techniques to prioritize and predict NFRs during the early stages of agile software development and the impacts that NFRs have on the software development process.