Abstract
In a large organization, informal communication and simple backlogs are not sufficient for the management of requirements and development work. Many large organizations are struggling to successfully adopt agile methods, but there is still little scientific knowledge on requirements management in large-scale agile development organizations. We present an in-depth study of an Ericsson telecommunications node development organization which employs a large scale agile method to develop telecommunications system software. We describe how the requirements flow from strategy to release, and related benefits and problems. Data was collected by 43 interviews, which were analyzed qualitatively. The requirements management was done in three different processes, each of which had a different process model, purpose and planning horizon. The release project management process was plan-driven, feature development process was continuous and implementation management process was agile. The perceived benefits included reduced development lead time, increased flexibility, increased planning efficiency, increased developer motivation and improved communication effectiveness. The recognized problems included difficulties in balancing planning effort, overcommitment, insufficient understanding of the development team autonomy, defining the product owner role, balancing team specialization, organizing system-level work and growing technical debt. The study indicates that agile development methods can be successfully employed in organizations where the higher level planning processes are not agile. Combining agile methods with a flexible feature development process can bring many benefits, but large-scale software development seems to require specialist roles and significant coordination effort.
Highlights
The traditional, plan-driven product and project management models are not well suited for agile development organizations where scoping decisions must be made frequently and requirements engineering is performed concurrently with implementation (Jantunen et al 2011)
We answer RQ1.2, What are the processes of the requirements flow? by describing how requirements flow thorough three processes: The release project management process provides information for requirements elicitation and analysis, new requirements are created and elaborated in the feature development process and the requirements are further elaborated and implemented in the implementation management process
Feature development is a continuous process that runs parallel to the release project management process
Summary
The traditional, plan-driven product and project management models are not well suited for agile development organizations where scoping decisions must be made frequently and requirements engineering is performed concurrently with implementation (Jantunen et al 2011). There is an increasing number of empirical studies of large-scale agile development 2015b; Moe et al 2014; Bass 2015; Eckstein 2014), there is little research on requirements management in large-scale agile development organizations More research is warranted in order to identify the contextual factors that affect the success or failure of specific ways of requirements management in large organizations that employ agile development methods. We summarize two recent secondary studies on agile requirements engineering. Secondary studies on agile requirements engineering have been recently conducted by Inayat et al (2015) and Heikkilaet al.
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