Evaluating the Effectiveness of Using Catalogues to Elicit Non-Functional Requirements

Non-Functional Requirements (NFR) are subjective, interactive and relative, thus realizing the need for particular NFR is by itself a challenge. Furthermore understanding what the software must implement in order to cope with these needs may prove to be an even more challenging task. One way of addressing the need for help on NFR elicitation is the use of catalogues. However, it is not clear how effective it is to use them. This work investigates it through an empirical study where different teams will model the same problem. Two teams will use catalogues with a systematic method, another two teams will use catalogs in an ad hoc manner and yet another two teams will not use catalogues. We show at the end of this work that teams using catalogues performed significantly better.