Understanding factors and practices of software security and performance verification

Abstract

[EN] Software systems strongly support the daily activities of society. Thus, software failures can bring huge losses. Therefore, verification activities are essential and should evaluate not only the functionality of the software but also its properties represented by the non-functional requirements. Thus, this work proposes a body of knowledge containing the characterization of the most relevant non-functional requirements for software systems. Besides, the body of knowledge includes the testing approaches that can be used to verify these requirements. In particular, the work goes more in-depth into characterizing security and performance verification practices used by software development organizations and the factors that support decision-making related to these practices. Additionally, moderating factors of security and performance verification activities are presented, as well as actions to their promotion. The organization of this body of knowledge made use of structured literature reviews, case studies, rapid reviews, and surveys. Such investigation strategies enabled the generation of evidence-based results, which can support the software practitioners to improve their non-functional requirement verification practices and software researchers to identify research challenges in the area.