Agile Requirements Engineering: A systematic literature review

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.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

Agile values and their implementation in practice

Today agile approaches are often used for the development of digital products. Since their development in the 90s, Agile Methodologies, such as Scrum and Extreme Programming, have evolved. Team collaboration is strongly influenced by the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto. The values and principles described in the Agile Manifesto support the optimization of the development process. In this article, the current operation is analyzed in Agile Product Development Processes. Both, the cooperation in the project team and the understanding of the roles and tasks will be analyzed. The results are set in relation to the best practices of Agile Methodologies. A quantitative questionnaire related to best practices in Agile Product Development was developed. The study was carried out with 175 interdisciplinary participants from the IT industry. For the evaluation of the results, 93 participants were included who have expertise in the subject area Agile Methodologies. On one hand, it is shown that the collaborative development of product-related ideas brings benefits. On the other hand, it is investigated which effect a good understanding of the product has on decisions made during the implementation. Furthermore, the skillset of product managers, the use of pair programming, and the advantages of cross-functional teams are analyzed.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TIN2013-46928-C3-3-

Enterprise Experience into the Integration of Human-Centered Design and Kanban

he integration of Human-Centered Design (HCD) and Agile Software Development (ASD) promises the development of competitive products comprising a good User Experience (UX). This study has investigated the integration of HCD and Kanban with the aim to gain industrial experiences in a real world context. A case study showed that requirements flow into the development process in a structured manner by adding a design board. To this end, the transparency concerning recurring requirements increased. We contribute to the body of knowledge of software development by providing practical insights into Human-Centered Agile Development (HCAD). On one hand, it is shown that the integration of HCD and Kanban leads to a product with a good UX and makes the development process more human-centered. On the other hand, we conclude that a cross-functional collaboration speeds up product development.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

A Modeling Language for Agile Requirements Engineering

Agile methodologies have an impact on how organizations carry out Requirements Engineering (RE). In this context, organizations use different kind of agile techniques like artifacts, meetings, methods or roles, but there is a lack of specific guidelines for agile RE. The aim of this paper is to present a modeling language for supporting organizational aspects of agile RE. It allows the visualization of agile RE concepts and their relationships, which can be used to define guidelines for a specific organization, project or domain. The modeling language for agile RE is used in projects in industry and our experiences reveal that it supports organizations in detecting problems and visualizing internal conflicts during the agile requirements phase, among other benefits

Towards a standardized questionnaire for measuring agility at team level

Context: Twenty years after the publication of the agile manifesto, agility is becoming more and more popular in different contexts. Agile values are changing the way people work together and influence people’s mindset as well as the culture of organizations. Many organizations have understood that continuous improvement is based on measurement. Objective: The objective of this paper is to present how agility can be measured at the team level. For this reason, we will introduce our questionnaire for measuring agility, which is based on the agile values of the manifesto. Method: We developed a questionnaire comprising 36 items that measure the current state of a team’s agility in six dimensions (communicative, change affine, iterative, self-organized, product-driven and improvement-oriented). This questionnaire has been evaluated with respect to several expert reviews and in a case study. Results: The questionnaire provides a method for measuring the current state of agility, which takes the individual context of the team into account. Fur thermore, our research shows, that this technique enables the user to uncover dysfunctionalities in a team. Conclusion: Practitioners and organizations can use our questionnaire to opti mize collaboration within their teams in terms of agility. In particular, the value delivery of an organization can be increased by optimizing collaboration at the team level. The development of this questionnaire is a continuous learning process with the aim to develop a standardized questionnaire for measuring agility.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades PID2019-105455GB-C3

A Methodology for Agile Requirements Engineering based on a Pattern Approach

Abstract. Agile Software Development (ASD) is used facing the challenge to reduce time to market and to deliver systems, which meets customer expectations. In ASD, Requirements Engineering (RE) is carried out in an iterative manner and therefore established approaches have to be adopted with strong focus on stakeholder and user involvement. The results of a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) show that there are different ways to carry out Agile RE approaches, what increases heterogeneity among them. This thesis studies how a commonly accepted framework for Agile RE looks like. To this end, the initial phase for creating a methodology based on a pattern approach will be performed. Therefore, the design science research methodology is applied to carry out the research. The designed artifact is a metamodel that describes the Agile RE process at an abstract level. It represents the main part of the methodology and will be evaluated through an international qualitative study

Modelling Agile Requirements using Context-based Persona Stories

In recent years hybrid approaches focusing on user needs by integrating Agile methodologies (e.g. Scrum, Kanban or Extreme Programming) with Human-Centered Design (HCD) have proven to be particularly suitable for the development of Web systems. On the one hand, HCD techniques are used for requirements elicitation and, on the other hand, they can be utilized to elicit navigation relationships in Web projects. Navigation is one of the basic pillars of Web systems and also a fundamental element for the methodologies within the Model-Driven Web Engineering (MDWE) field. This paper presents an approach to model Agile requirements by means of integrating HCD techniques into Agile software development. We contribute to the software development body of knowledge by creating the concept of a Context-based Persona Story (CBPS) and formalizing it through a metamodel. Our approach covers the modelling of users and stakeholders by personas as well as the visualization of the context of use by storyboards. The attributes of the context of use enable us to elicit acceptance criteria for describing the scope of an Agile requirement.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2013-46928-C3-3-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-RMinisterio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2015-71938-RED

A Preliminary Comparative Study of the Baylis–Hillman Reaction in Ionic Liquid Solution and Gelled Ionic Liquid

Baylis–Hillman reaction in ionic liquid ([BMIM][PF]) solution under stirring conditions and in the presence of a base (DABCO) can also be performed efficiently in non-stirred gel phase upon gelation of the ionic liquid using a LMW gelator (i.e., (S)-N-(1-oxo-3-phenyl-1-(tridecylamino)propan-2-yl)benzamide). In this preliminary study, the authors have compared both reaction media and the results showed similar behaviors. Interestingly, the ionogel is found to be slightly more effective affording the desired products with moderately higher yields within a reaction period of 24 h.We gratefully acknowledge the University of Regensburg and the German Research Foundation (DFG) (1748/3‐1; 1748/3‐2) for financial support. D.D.D. thanks the DFG for the Heisenberg Professorship Award.Peer Reviewe

A Metamodel for Agile Requirements Engineering

Value delivery is becoming an important asset for an organization due to increasing competition in industry. Therefore, companies apply Agile Software Development (ASD) to be more competitive and reduce time to market. Using ASD for the development of systems implies that established approaches of Requirements Engineering (RE) undergo some changes in order to be more flexible to changing requirements. To this end, the field of agile RE is emergent and different process models for agile RE have arisen. The aim of this paper is to build an abstract layer about the variety of existing process models by means of a metamodel for agile RE. It has been created in several iterations and relies on the evaluation of related process models. Furthermore, we have derived process models for agile RE in industry by presenting instances of the metamodel in two different cases: one is based on Scrum whereas the other is based on Kanban. This paper contributes to the software development body of knowledge by delivering a metamodel for agile RE that supports researchers and practitioners modeling and improving their own process models. We can conclude that the agile RE metamodel is highly relevant for the industry as well as for the research community, since we have derived it following empirical research in the field of ASD.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TIN2016-76956-C3-2-