Agile and Traditional Requirements Engineering: A Survey

Journal of Software Engineering & Intelligent Systems, 2018

Requirement engineering (RE) is one of the important phases of development life cycle. Many software projects are failed because that was made without enough requirements information. RE is one of a process of customer services which have to expect customer from a system. Correct executions of engineering requirements caused to reduce the cost of software projects. In the agile methods unlike traditional methods, RE agrees with the change of new requirements. In this research, a survey, about practices, techniques, challenges, and activities, is conducted in agile requirement engineering. Moreover, this survey compares traditional RE and agile RE in different aspects.

—Traditional RE and Agile RE are two different approaches on the basis of their planning and control mechanism. This Paper distinguishes the Traditional RE and Agile RE. Furthermore it investigates the reasons for which software industries shifted from Traditional RE to Agile RE. Research is carried out by conducting a literature study and finally a case study of software development to evaluate which approach has better success rate than other. With the help of our finding and results we have evaluated that Agile RE performs better than Traditional RE in large organizations where changes evolve throughout the development phase of software life cycle.

In the past few years, agile software development approach has emerged as a most attractive software development approach. A typical CASE environment consists of a number of CASE tools operating on a common hardware and software platform and note that there are a number of different classes of users of a CASE environment. In fact, some users such as software developers and managers wish to make use of CASE tools to support them in developing application systems and monitoring the progress of a project. This development approach has quickly caught the attention of a large number of software development firms. However, this approach particularly pays attention to development side of software development project while neglects critical aspects of requirements engineering process. In fact, there is no standard requirement engineering process in this approach and requirements engineering activities vary from situation to situation. As a result, there emerge a large number of problems whi...

This article compares traditional requirements engineering approaches and agile software development. Our paper analyzes commonalities and differences of both approaches and determines possible ways how agile software development can benefit from requirements engineering methods.

Interest in the adoption of Agile methodologies has grown in recent years as a strategy to minimize problems in software development. However recent studies indicate high rates of failure also in projects that use agile processes. In this context, this research conducted an exploratory study to investigate how Requirements Engineering is used in projects that adopt agile methodologies. For this, a Systematic Mapping was performed and it identified the engineering requirements techniques that are running in the industry, the problems and limitations in projects that adopt agile methodologies. The low involvement of users and the constant changes of requirements were identified as the main challenges to be overcome.

Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming, 2017

Agile Software Development (ASD) is becoming more popular in all fields of industry. For an agile transformation, organizations need to continuously improve their established approaches to Requirements Engineering (RE) as well as their approaches to software development. This is accompanied by some challenges in terms of agile RE. The main objective of this paper is to identify the most important challenges in agile RE industry has to face today. Therefore, we conducted an iterative expert judgement process with 26 experts in the field of ASD, comprising three complementary rounds. In sum, we identified 20 challenges in three rounds. Six of these challenges are defined as key challenges. Based on the results, we provide options for dealing with those key challenges by means of agile techniques and tools. The results show that the identified challenges are often not limited to ASD, but they rather refer to software development in general. Therefore, we can conclude that organizations still struggle with agile transition and understanding agile values, in particular, in terms of stakeholder and user involvement.

csc.ncsu.edu

Traditional software processes, while rich with support for requirements activities, are not especially well suited for rapid software development. Agile software processes have recently received increased attention due to the need to develop software for rapidly changing environments; however they fail to properly support essential requirements engineering practices. This paper proposes a agile approach to software development, ADaPT (Agile Development and Prototyping Technique), which employs proven scenario and goal-based analysis techniques to elicit and structure requirements, ensuring that system requirements are iteratively examined via prototyping. ADaPT incorporates the concept of "user stories" in extreme programming and scenarios as traditionally used in requirements engineering. While introducing rigor into requirements activities, agility is maintained in ADaPT by documenting only the most essential elements. Validation is currently underway on several software development efforts that employ the model to support rapid development of electronic commerce applications.

Research Journal of Computer and Information Technology Sciences, 2014

Agile has gained a lot of popularity nowadays and have become a major source of money for lots of organizations. We have compared traditional requirement engineering approaches and agile requirement engineering. In addition to this, discussion over here revolves around agile methodologies, requirement-engineering approaches, and how we perform traditional requirement engineering in agile software development. On basis of literature, requirement-engineering is discussed in detail in both traditional and agile software developments along with benefits and challenges and in addition to this, improvements/proposed ideas needed application of Agile in distributed development environments are proposed effectively.

Abstract: Collecting, understanding, and managing requirements is a critical aspect in all development methods. This is true for Agile Methods as well. In particular, several agile practices deal with requirements in order to implement them correctly and satisfy the needs of the customer. These practices focus on a continuous interaction with the customer to address the requirements evolution over time, prioritize them, and deliver the most valuable functionalities first.

Computer Standards & Interfaces, 2017

Nowadays, Agile Software Development (ASD) is used to cope with increasing complexity in system development. Hybrid development models, with the integration of User-Centered Design (UCD), are applied with the aim to deliver competitive products with a suitable User Experience (UX). Therefore, stakeholder and user involvement during Requirements Engineering (RE) are essential in order to establish a collaborative environment with constant feedback loops. The aim of this study is to capture the current state of the art of the literature related to Agile RE with focus on stakeholder and user involvement. In particular, we investigate what approaches exist to involve stakeholder in the process, which methodologies are commonly used to present the user perspective and how requirements management is been carried out. We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) with an extensive quality assessment of the included studies. We identified 27 relevant papers. After analyzing them in detail, we derive deep insights to the following aspects of Agile RE: stakeholder and user involvement, data gathering, user perspective, integrated methodologies, shared understanding, artifacts, documentation and Non-Functional Requirements (NFR). Agile RE is a complex research field with cross-functional influences. This study will contribute to the software development body of knowledge by assessing the involvement of stakeholder and user in Agile RE, providing methodologies that make ASD more human-centric and giving an overview of requirements management in ASD. Fig. 1. In ASD people focus on outcomes and how they can fulfil human needs through the outputs they produce.

2015

Agile Methods are characterized as flexible and easily adaptable. The need to keep up with multiple high-priority projects and shorter time-to-market demands could explain their increasing popularity. It also raises concerns of whether or not use of these methods jeopardizes quality. Since Agile methods allow for changes throughout the process, they also create probabilities to impact software quality at any time. This thesis examines the process of requirement engineering as performed with Agile method in terms of its similarities and differences to requirement engineering as performed with the more traditional Waterfall method. It compares both approaches from a software quality perspective using a case study of 16 software projects. The main contribution of this work is to bring empirical evidence from real life cases that illustrate how Agile methods significantly impacts software quality, including the potential for a larger number of defects due to poor non-functional requirements elicitation. iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It has been an enlightening journey from the inception till the completion of this master thesis. During all this time of ups and downs, I was encouraged and given a lot of support by a lot of people, which I would like to thank with all my heart and sincere feelings. I would like to thank my supervisor Professor Luiz Maricio Cysnerios for giving me this opportunity and having faith in me. I am compelled to say that without his encouragement and enthusiastic support, this thesis would not have been possible. I can never thank him enough for his academic support and help.

Information and Software Technology, 2000

Requirements engineering are one of the most crucial steps in software development process. Without a well-written requirements specification, developer's do not know what to build, user's do not know what to expect, and there is no way to validate that the created system actually meets the original needs of the user. Much of the emphasis in the recent attention for a software engineering discipline has centered on the formalization of software specifications and their flowdown to system design and verification. Undoubtedly, the incorporation of such sound, complete, and unambiguous traceability is vital to the success of any project. However, it has been our experience through years of work (on both sides) within the government and private sector military industrial establishment that many projects fail even before they reach the formal specification stage. That is because too often the developer does not truly understand or address the real requirements of the user and his environment.

2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE)

Motivated by their success in software development, companies implement agile methods and their practices increasingly for software-intense, large products, such as cars, telecommunication infrastructure, and embedded systems. Such systems are usually subject to safety and regulative concerns as well as different development cycles of hardware and software. Consequently, requirements engineering involves upfront and detailed analysis, which can be at odds with agile (software) development. In this paper, we present results from a multiple case study with two car manufacturers, a telecommunications company, and a technology company that are on the journey to introduce organization wide continuous integration and continuous delivery to customers. Based on 20 qualitative interviews, 5 focus groups, and 2 cross-company workshops, we discuss possible scopes of agile methods within system development, the consequences this has on the role of requirements, and the challenges that arise from the interplay of requirements engineering and agile methods in large-scale system development. These relate in particular to communicating and managing knowledge about a) customer value and b) the system under development. We conclude that better alignment of a holistic requirements model with agile development practices promises rich gains in development speed, flexibility, and overall quality of software and systems.

2008

Abstract Agile requirements engineering is the approach of choice for many software producers whose realities include highly uncertain requirements, use of new development technology, and clients willing to explore the ways in which an evolving product can help their business goals. From customer's perspective, the activity of continuous requirements reprioritization forms the very core of today's agile approaches. However, the freedom for clients to do so does not come for free.

Customer unavailability and insufficient requirements gathering are challenges that have compromised the adoption of agile methodologies. This research proposes an exploratory study in the industry to investigate how requirements engineering is used in agile projects. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted and its results indicated the existence of problems in requirements engineering activities applied to agile projects. This research plan to perform a Survey with software engineers who uses agile practices, aiming to understand the perception of professionals about the best practices, challenges and limitations of the requirements engineering approaches currently used by the software industry. Then a new approach to the specification of requirements will be proposed using principles such as: Decrease constant dependence customer; Document only what is necessary to implement a requirement; Agile Practices; Quality Requirements. A experiment will be conducted to evaluate the quality and productivity of the proposed approach.