Activities and Practices of Requirements Engineering in Agile Software Environments

Abstract

Requirements are one of the important factors for software success. However, Requirements Engineering (RE) activities, in the Waterfall process model, are done sequentially in the analysis phase, which makes it difficult when RE practitioners think and reason about them in Agile Software Development (ASD) process model. RE practitioners need to find the established RE activities conventions in the ASD process model, especially with an increase of software companies, which transform to the ASD process model, in order to foster their transition to the new model. The objective of this study is to provide RE activities in ASD to allow RE practitioners to utilize the appropriate activity for specific ASD methodology. RE activities in ASD are handled repetitively and on a small scale, which makes them embedded in the development life cycle. This paper focuses on highlighting them in different ASD methodologies and discusses the practices that resolve the traditional Waterfall model issues. Although the ASD model has resolved some traditional RE issues, it introduced other issues, such as a consequence of trying to achieve an adequate balance between agility and stability. In addition, there is a lack of practices that target non-functional requirements.