Agile Team Members Perceptions on Non-functional Testing: Influencing Factors from an Empirical Study

Non-functional requirements define the overall qualities or attributes of a system. Although important, they are often neglected for many reasons, such as pressure of time and budget. In agile software development, there is a focus on the feature implementation and delivery of value to the customer and, as such, non-functional aspects of a system should also be of attention. Non-functional requirements testing is challenging due its cross-functional aspects and lack of clarity of their needs by business in the most part of projects. The goal of this paper is to empirically investigate how do agile team members handle non-functional testing in their projects, aiming to identify preliminary factors influencing the testing of non-functional requirements, specifically performance and security in agile development. We conducted interviews with twenty IT professionals in large multinational company. As result we could identify seven main factors influencing non-functional testing and four main practices adopted by them to overcome the challenges faced. We aim to replicate our investigation in a larger scale. Meanwhile, our work provides initial contributions to practitioners and inspires our future research.