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Engineering of quality requirements as perceived by near-shore development centers' architects in eastern Europe: the hole in the whole

Context: To software architects (SAs), the quality requirements (QRs) to a software system are key to designing the software architecture. However, understanding SAs' roles in the QRs engineering activities only recently became a topic in empirical requirements engineering research and very little is still known about QRs engineering from SAs' in large and distributed projects. Goal: This exploratory study aims at explicating how SAs are involved in engineering QRs in a specific distributed development setting, namely in organizations that distribute software development activities to closely located business units, known as near-shore development centres (NDCs), and in a specific geographic zone, namely Eastern Europe. Method: Based on interviews with 16 practitioners working on large projects in NDCs, we explicate the participation and involvement of NDCs' architects in QRs tasks. Results: We found that SAs from NDCs (i) are actively involved in QRs documentation and validation, (ii) are relatively passive participants in QRs elicitation and prioritization, and (iii) are not at all involved in QRs negotiation. Perhaps, our most surprising finding is that NDCs may often have economic incentives to misalign with onshore QRs practices. Conclusions: We explicated QRs practices, compared them to previously published ones, and found implications for both researchers and practitioners. Though, our results are preliminary, as they are from an exploratory study.