AFFINE for Enforcing Earlier Consideration of NFRs and Human Factors When Building Socio-Technical Systems Following Agile Methodologies

Nowadays, various user-centered and participatory design methodologies with different degree of agility are followed when building sophisticated socio-technical systems. Even when applying these methods, nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) are often considered too late in the development process and tension that may arise between users' and developers' needs remains mostly neglected. Furthermore, there is a conceptual lack of guidance and support for efficiently fulfilling NFRs in terms of software architecture in general. This paper aims at introducing the AFFINE framework simultaneously addressing these needs with (1) conceptually considering NFRs early in the development process, (2) explicitly balancing end-users' with developers' needs, and (3) a reference architecture providing support for NFRs. Constitutive requirements for AFFINE were gathered based on experiences from various projects on designing and implementing groupware systems.