An AHP-Based Framework for Effective Requirement Management in Agile Software Development (ASD)

In Agile changes may be made at any time throughout the project lifetime in agile projects. These changes, however, often lead to longer turnaround times and higher costs while having a substantial influence on the activities and quality of project management. The suggested framework's main goal is to increase the effectiveness and flexibility of the requirement engineering process by successfully managing requirements changes, particularly in contexts where Agile Software Development (ASD) is practiced. The Agile methodology has gained popularity as a strategy for developing software because it can adjust to changing requirements and deliver software gradually. To make sure that the software being produced satisfies stakeholder expectations and adds value to the firm, good requirement management is essential. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to prioritize requirements based on their relative relevance and urgency, this article introduces a framework for requirement management in Agile Projects. The most important requirements are taken care of first thanks to this strategy, which enables a more organized and informed decision-making process. We demonstrate the actual use of our framework in real-world contexts and highlight its efficacy in solving the issues faced by Agile projects by including a case study and an accompanying table. The suggested framework also supports the three core tenets of the Agile approach—transparency, cooperation, and continuous improvement—to foster an environment of excellence and ongoing learning within the Agile team. By developing these fundamental ideas, our framework not only supports Agile teams' continual growth and development but also helps them manage and prioritize requirements more efficiently, which ultimately improves project results and increases organizational value

Online Help Desk Development for the Residential Villages Facilities in the Campus

This report basically focuses on the University Technology PETRONAS (UTP) Online Residential College Maintenance System. This project is aimed at developing an online portal for the residential villages in the campus. This is an Internet based application that can be accessed anywhere that has an active internet connection. Registered users (students, village supervisors and maintenance staff) will be able to log in a request for service for any of the supported facilities. These requests will be sent to the concerned people, who are also valid users of the system, to get them resolved. It is hoped that this project can be a projectile to make it easier for the logging in of complaints and request regarding the facilities in the residential villages as well as making it easier for the maintenance of the residential villages in University Technology PETRONAS. As for the research elements of the project, it will incorporate the study on of how this online system can help to support the workflow and maintenance of the residential villages and also to check the successfulness of this portal to make the maintenance process to be more organized and faster. This system includes the functionality such as user login, information storage and retrieval, report conformation and etc. Detailed research and information gathering has been done throughout the semester to learn about the basis to execute this project with certain software's and databases. The research that has been done is also included in this report for better understanding of the purpose and requirements that are needed to undertake this project successfully. Most of the resources that have been used are from the internet and also from further reading in hardcopy books as well as online journals and articles. The software prototyping methodology has been selected to better manage the task throughout the project development given its flexibility when it comes to dealing with changing system requirements and time management. This report presents the background of the project which includes problem statement, objective of the project, literature review and methodology to carry out the project. Besides that, some related works are also provided in order to show similar works that have been carried out and some of the technologies that can be implemented

High Profile Systems Illustrating Contradistinctive Aspects of Systems Engineering

AbstractMany modern systems have a high degree of dependence on embedded software in order to perform their required functions. Some examples include transportation systems, hand-held devices, and medical equipment, among others. In designing their products, systems engineers typically take a top-down, process-oriented approach, decomposing a complex system into simpler, easier to manage, subsystems; the system requirements can then be allocated and flowed down as necessary to the appropriate subsystems. Software engineers take a more bottom-up, object-oriented approach, using simple building blocks to create a more complex system, and enhancing their existing blocks with new ones where necessary.In many cases, both techniques must be employed together in order to design a successful system. Although it may have been acceptable in the past for simpler systems to view software as a separate subsystem with a fixed set of requirements, greater complexity of modern systems requires a corresponding improvement in working methodology. With the software playing an increasingly pivotal role, systems engineers must become much more familiar with the architecture of the software than previously; Likewise, software engineers need a systems-level view to understand which aspects of the design could be volatile due to new stakeholders (bringing with them new requirements), technology upgrades, and the changing world in general.Systems whose success or failure play out in the public arena provide a rare opportunity to study the factors that contribute to their outcome. Using two such systems, the Denver International Airport baggage handling system and the Apple iPad, this paper will study some best practices that can lead to project success or failure, and show the importance of a rigorous capture and flow down to both hardware and software of the requirements that must be correct from the start, as well as of designing an architecture that can accommodate the inevitable changes to a system.Designing extensible systems with a tolerance for future changes is a key factor in modern complex systems. The baggage handling system failed in part because of a failure to appreciate the central role of software and an apparent lack of a suitable strategy for handling requirement changes. Methods for creating software which is resilient to change have been well studied; however what may be somewhat lacking even to the present day is a broader education of the existing body of knowledge, and how to integrate it with systems engineering methods.The iPad succeeded where many of its predecessors had failed by a successful application of traditional systems engineering techniques and correctly implementing the hardware elements. Coming from companies with experience in software development, the system extensibility was not an issue in this case. However, the designers of the earlier systems seemingly failed to understand the actual market needs, failed to develop a corresponding set of requirements to meet those needs, and failed to translate those requirements into an integrated hardware/software solution

Looking for Reasons behind Success in Dealing with Requirements Change

During development, requirements of software systems are subject to change. Unfortunately, managing changing requirements can take a lot of time and effort. Yet some companies show a better management of changes in requirements than others. Why? What is it that makes some projects deal with changing requirements better than others? We pursue the long term goal of understanding the mechanisms used to successfully deal with change in requirements. In this paper we gather knowledge about the state-of-the-art and the state-of-practice. We studied eight software development projects in four different companies --large and small, inclined toward structured and toward agile principles of development--, interviewing their project managers and analyzing their answers. Our findings include a list of practical (rather than theoretical) factors affecting the ability to cope with small changes in requirements. Results suggest a central role of size as a factor determining the flexibility showed either by the organization or by the software development team. We report the research method used and validate our results via expert interviews, who could relate to our findings

A dashboard-based approach for efficient requirements change management

Requirements gathering and documentation are important first steps for a successful software engineering project. The documented requirements act as a guideline for design and development of software products. Requirements also represent customer expectations for the end product. Since these documented requirements serve important purposes for many stakeholders, managing requirement changes effectively plays a major role in the overall success of any project. Changes in requirements are very common in software engineering and can occur during any phase of software development lifecycle (SDLC). Though the impact of requirement changes differs depending on the SDLC phase in which it occurred, there is almost always a setback that happens in terms of the project timeline. This scenario is common in projects that follow both Agile/Scrum methodology and ones that follow the more traditional Waterfall model. In this report, I will first present two case studies of how requirement changes impacted the timelines of two projects (one following Agile/Scrum methodology and another following Waterfall methodology). In the second part of this report, I will propose and design a user-friendly dashboard, which could be used to speed up the delays caused by changing requirements.Electrical and Computer Engineerin

Smart technologies for effective reconfiguration: the FASTER approach

Current and future computing systems increasingly require that their functionality stays flexible after the system is operational, in order to cope with changing user requirements and improvements in system features, i.e. changing protocols and data-coding standards, evolving demands for support of different user applications, and newly emerging applications in communication, computing and consumer electronics. Therefore, extending the functionality and the lifetime of products requires the addition of new functionality to track and satisfy the customers needs and market and technology trends. Many contemporary products along with the software part incorporate hardware accelerators for reasons of performance and power efficiency. While adaptivity of software is straightforward, adaptation of the hardware to changing requirements constitutes a challenging problem requiring delicate solutions. The FASTER (Facilitating Analysis and Synthesis Technologies for Effective Reconfiguration) project aims at introducing a complete methodology to allow designers to easily implement a system specification on a platform which includes a general purpose processor combined with multiple accelerators running on an FPGA, taking as input a high-level description and fully exploiting, both at design time and at run time, the capabilities of partial dynamic reconfiguration. The goal is that for selected application domains, the FASTER toolchain will be able to reduce the design and verification time of complex reconfigurable systems providing additional novel verification features that are not available in existing tool flows

Comparative Study on Agile software development methodologies

Today-s business environment is very much dynamic, and organisations are constantly changing their software requirements to adjust with new environment. They also demand for fast delivery of software products as well as for accepting changing requirements. In this aspect, traditional plan-driven developments fail to meet up these requirements. Though traditional software development methodologies, such as life cycle-based structured and object oriented approaches, continue to dominate the systems development few decades and much research has done in traditional methodologies, Agile software development brings its own set of novel challenges that must be addressed to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software. It is a set of software development methods based on iterative and incremental development process, where requirements and development evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams that allows rapid delivery of high quality software to meet customer needs and also accommodate changes in the requirements. In this paper, we significantly identify and describe the major factors, that Agile development approach improves software development process to meet the rapid changing business environments. We also provide a brief comparison of agile development methodologies with traditional systems development methodologies, and discuss current state of adopting agile methodologies. We speculate that from the need to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of the valuable software, Agile software development is emerged as an alternative to traditional plan-based software development methods. The purpose of this paper, is to provide an in-depth understanding, the major benefits of agile development approach to software development industry, as well as provide a comparison study report of ASDM over TSDM.Comment: 25 pages, 25 images, 86 references used, with authors biographie