REQUIREMENTS PRIORITIZATION IN AGILE PROJECTS: FROM EXPERTS' PERSPECTIVES

Software becomes an essential part of our lives because of the required automation in every field. A software requirement plays an important role in its development. In Requirement Engineering (RE), requirement prioritization (RP) is the crucial activity to successfully deliver the software system. Recently, Agile Software Development (ASD) methods have become a widespread approach used by the software industry. ASD stresses the importance of providing the customer with a product with maximized business value. To achieve that, RP is used. The aim of this study is to investigate the current practice related to the RP process, including its timing, participants, criteria used, and prioritization techniques applied. An online questionnaire (based on a literature review) has been designed and a survey has been conducted with the focus group which mainly involves some practitioners or experts from the industry (domain experts) together with academicians (knowledge experts) in few parts of Malaysia. The researchers received 20 valid responses indicating RP practices in agile projects. The researchers found out that despite the fact that business value is the most common criterion used to prioritize requirements; other criteria like importance, complexity, and cost are considered as well. Other findings indicate that consideration of such multiple criteria requires different viewpoints, thus making RP a process that has to involve many participants of different roles in prioritizing the requirements. While the most popular technique used by the practitioners in this study is the MoSCoW technique. Besides, the survey study also asks for any special attention given to the non-functional requirements (NFRs) or user stories in the prioritization process in agile projects, since commonly known, due to the nature of the agile environment itself, the NFRs are nearly always neglected during the RP process. The results have shown that over 85% of respondents giving attention to NFRs during prioritization in agile projects and less than 15% stated that there are a few reasons why their team did not pay much attention to NFRs during the prioritization process

<i>Trace++</i>: A Traceability Approach for Agile Software Engineering

Agile methodologies have been introduced as an alternative to traditional software engineering methodologies. However, despite the advantages of using agile methodologies, the transition between traditional and agile methodologies is not an easy task. There are several problems associated with the use of agile methodologies. Examples of these problems are related to (i) lack of metrics to measure the amount of rework that occurs per sprint, (ii) interruption of a project after several iterations, (iii) changes in the requirements, (iv) lack of documentation, and (v) lack of management control. In this paper we present Trace++, a traceability technique that extends traditional traceability relationships with extra information in order to support the transition between traditional and agile software development. The use of Trace++ has been evaluated in two real projects of different software development companies to measure the benefits of using Trace++ to support agile software development

Complementing Measurements and Real Options Concepts to Support Inter-iteration Decision-Making in Agile Projects

Agile software projects are characterized by iterative and incremental development, accommodation of changes and active customer participation. The process is driven by creating business value for the client, assuming that the client (i) is aware of it, and (ii) is capable to estimate the business value, associated with the separate features of the system to be implemented. This paper is focused on the complementary use of measurement techniques and concepts of real-option-analysis to assist clients in assessing and comparing alternative sets of requirements. Our overall objective is to provide systematic support to clients for the decision-making process on what to implement in each iteration. The design of our approach is justified by using empirical data, published earlier by other authors

Some Findings Concerning Requirements in Agile Methodologies

gile methods have appeared as an attractive alternative to conventional methodologies. These methods try to reduce the time to market and, indirectly, the cost of the product through flexible development and deep customer involvement. The processes related to requirements have been extensively studied in literature, in most cases in the frame of conventional methods. However, conclusions of conventional methodologies could not be necessarily valid for Agile; in some issues, conventional and Agile processes are radically different. As recent surveys report, inadequate project requirements is one of the most conflictive issues in agile approaches and better understanding about this is needed. This paper describes some findings concerning requirements activities in a project developed under an agile methodology. The project intended to evolve an existing product and, therefore, some background information was available. The major difficulties encountered were related to non-functional needs and management of requirements dependencies

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