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

Managing requirements in market-driven software project: Agile methods view

Vrijeme do plasiranja na tržište i nedovoljno početno saznanje o potrebama dva su značajna problema po kojima se organiziranje potreba kod projekata razvijanja softvera za tržište razlikuje od projekata za softver po narudžbi. Ti se problemi mogu riješiti primjenom agilnih metodologija razvoja softvera kad se radi o tržišno orijentiranom softveru budući da Agilne metode naglašavaju dinamički pristup organiziranju potreba usko povezan s iterativnim ciklusom isporuke. U ovom radu, dinamički pristup Agilnih metoda definiranju potreba koristi se za uspješnu implementaciju složenog tržišno orijentiranog softverskog projekta.Time-to-market and insufficient initial requirements are two significant challenges that make managing requirements for market-driven software projects different from custom-made software projects. These challenges can be resolved by using agile software development methodologies for market-driven software development as agile methods put emphasis on a dynamic approach for requirement engineering which works closely with an iterative release cycle. In this study, dynamic requirement engineering approach of Agile methods was used for the successful implementation of market-driven complex software project

Handling requirements dependencies in agile projects: A focus group with agile software development practitioners

Agile practices on requirements dependencies are a relatively unexplored topic in literature. Empirical studies on it are scarce. This research sets out to uncover concepts that practitioners in companies of various sizes across the globe and in various industries, use for dealing with requirements dependencies in their agile software projects. Concepts were revealed through online focus group research, using an adapted forum for discussion, and grounded theory to analyze the responses. Our study resulted in the following findings: (1) requirements dependencies occur in agile projects and are important to these projects' success just as this is known for `traditional' software projects'; (2) requirements dependencies (i) were considered and treated as part of risk management, (ii) were deemed a responsibility of the individual team members, and (iii) mostly did affect project planning; (3) continuous communication and collaboration - two essential features of any agile method, were found critical to mitigating the risks due to dependencies; (4) a hybrid approach to architecture between agile and plan-driven methods was perceived to yield maximum scalability and help coping with dependencies; (5) `cross-cutting concerns', a category of dependencies, were not uniformly understood in an agile context and require more research

Entwurf eines agilen Requirements Engineering Vorgehens mit Fokus auf Gebrauchstauglichkeit für das Allianz Business System

Um einen agilen Requirements Engineering-Prozess mit Fokus auf Gebrauchstauglichkeit für das Allianz Business System zu etablieren, erläutert diese Arbeit zunächst den IST-Zustand. Dabei sticht vor allem die ungenügende Einbindung von Benutzerinnen und Benutzern hervor. Bisher werden diese erst am Ende des Prozesses eingebunden. Um dies zu beheben, werden zwei bekannte Ansätze aus der Literatur näher betrachtet und deren „Best Practices“ vereint. Auch für die Integration von klassischem Requirements Engineering und agilen Methoden werden aus der Literatur die Praktiken extrahiert. Diese beiden Sammlungen an Praktiken sind die Grundlage für die Behebung der identifizierten Defizite, um das Ziel eines agilen Require¬ments Engineering-Prozesses mit Fokus auf Gebrauchstauglichkeit für das Allianz Business System zu erreichen

A Technique for Evaluating the Health Status of a Software Module Using Process Metrics

Identifying error-prone files in large software systems has been an area where significant attention has been paid over the years. In this thesis, we propose a process-metrics based method for predicting the health status of a file based on its commit profile in its GitHub repository. Precisely, for each file and each bug fixing commit a file participates, we compute a dependency score of the committed file with its other co-committed files. The calculated score is appropriately decayed if the file does not participate in the new bug-fixing commits in the system. By examining the trend of the dependency score for each file as time elapses, we try to deduce whether this file will be participating in a bug fixing commit in the immediately following commits. This approach has been evaluated in 21 medium to large open-source systems by correlating the dependency metric trend against the known outcome obtained from a data set we use as a gold standard

Agile and conventional methodologies: an empirical investigation of their impact on software quality parameters

The advent of agile methodologies has brought about an illuminating debate in Software Engineering, particularly with regard to software quality. Some studies have reported that agile methodologies do improve software quality when compared to traditional methodologies; other studies have been inconclusive or contradictory, while others have argued that empirical evidence is limited. This study sought to investigate the correlation between agile methodologies when compared to traditional methodologies for selected software quality parameters. The research design was causal comparative, as well as correlational. The approach was quantitative, using a survey as the data collection method. SPSS was used to conduct descriptive and correlational analysis for 106 responses received. The main findings were that there was a statistically significant relation between traditional methodology use and ease of system testing (p=0.014); a statistically significant relation between traditional methodology use and timeliness (p=0.02); a statistically significant relation between software quality standards used and ease of system testing (p=0.017); a statistically significant relation between active stakeholder participation on projects and ease of system interactivity (p=0.047); and a statistically significant relation between mandatory workshop interactivity (p=0.047); and a statistically significant relation between mandatory workshop attendance or training and ease of system navigation (p=0.031).Claims that agile methodology use leads to improved software quality for selected quality parameters could not be empirically validated. The association between most of the selected software quality criteria in relation to methodology use in general was not apparent. Agile methodologies are suitable in small environments. Scrum was the most widely used agile methodology by far. The popularity and adoption state of XP showed a significantly decreasing trend. Traditional and agile methodologies combined are being used (47%) more than any other methodology. Agile methodology use (28%) surpassed traditional methodology use (19%). A suitable consensus definition for agile methodologies did not emerge from the data collected. The most suitable project life cycle model was evolutionary, incremental and iterative. ‘Other’ methodologies, meaning customised agile or SDLC, are suitable, as the environment becomes increasingly large and complex. Only 13% of organisations surveyed have an agile experience of six years and beyond. Based on these findings and gaps in the literature, implications and recommendations for further research areas are proposed, where the findings and contributions of this study are found to be relevant to practice for application and to academia for further researchCollege of Engineering, Science and TechnologyM. Sc. (Computing

Mockup-Driven Development: introduciendo agilidad en procesos basados en modelos

En este trabajo de tesis se describirá una técnica de modelado centrado en mockups, introduciéndola primero con MockupDD Web. Luego de haber ejemplificado el desarrollo centrado en mockups para metodologías MDWE, se describirá un marco general para el modelado sobre mockups (lo que se referenciará como metodología MockupDD general) y una instanciación particular de esta metodología además de la ya presentada para la Web. Las principales contribuciones de la metodología MockupDD y sus especializaciones son: (1) Mejorar el workflow en cascada de las metodologías MDD tradicionales (en especial, aquellas MDWE) para permitir acortar las iteraciones y permitir a usuarios finales y clientes involucrados interactuar más rápidamente son el software generado, agilizando el proceso. (2) Mejorar la productividad en el modelado de aplicaciones a través de la técnica de modelado de aplicaciones sobre mockups reduciendo sus errores y tiempo requerido, como se mostrará luego en las secciones de validación (3) Introducir a clientes y usuarios finales en el proceso de desarrollo, utilizando artefactos de especificación de requerimientos de fácil comprensión para los mismos en lugar de conceptos de modelado comprensibles sólo para desarrolladores. En este contexto se utilizarán mockups y diferentes técnicas de anotación y especificación de requerimientos formales sobre los mismos. (4) La implementación de un lenguaje de modelado sobre mockups con diferentes vistas, satisfaciendo al mismo tiempo la necesidad de comprensión de requerimientos por parte de los usuarios finales y las capacidades técnicas requeridas por los desarrolladores. (5) Con ayuda de esta versatilidad del lenguaje y del uso de mockups (los cuales son comprensibles en su totalidad por usuarios finales), proveer un método de modelado más trazable desde el punto de vista de los requerimientos.Facultad de Informátic

Representation of User Stories in Descriptive Markup

The environment in which a software system is developed is in a constant state of flux. The changes at higher levels of software development often manifest themselves in changes at lower levels, especially its activities and artifacts. In the past decade, a notable change has been the emergence of agile methodologies for software development. In a number of agile methodologies, user stories have been adopted as a style of expressing software requirements. This thesis is about theory and practice of describing user stories so as to make them amenable to both humans and machines. In that regard, relevant concerns in describing user stories must be considered and treated separately. In this thesis, a number of concerns in describing user stories are identified, and a collection of conceptual models to help create an understanding of those concerns are formulated. In particular, conceptual models for user story description, stakeholders, information, representation, and presentation are proposed. To facilitate structured descriptions of user stories, a User Story Markup Language (USML) is specified. USML depends on the requisite conceptual models for theoretical foundation. It is informed by experiential knowledge, especially conventions, guidelines, patterns, principles, recommended practices, and standards in markup language engineering. In doing so, USML aims to make the decisions underlying its development explicit. USML provides conformance criteria that include validation against multiple schema documents. In particular, USML is equipped with a grammar-based schema document and a rule-based schema document that constrain USML instance documents in different ways. USML aims to be flexible and extensible. In particular, USML enables a variety of user story forms, which allow a range of user story descriptions. USML instance documents can be intermixed with markup fragments of other languages, presented on conventional user agents, and organized and manipulated in different ways. USML can also be extended in a number of ways to accommodate the needs of those user story stakeholders who wish to personalize the language