Requirement Strategy in Large-Scale Agile Development

Abstract

[Context and Motivation] Agile methodologies are created to facilitate short time to market. Large-scale system development such as complex products and embedded systems are not fairly treated by agile, especially with respect to managing stakeholders and system requirements. Despite approaches to agile requirements engineering, organizations are still facing many challenges regarding system development. Traditional requirement engineering approaches offer a detailed analysis including elicitation, documentation, evaluation, and management, yet it is difficult to integrate them with agile ways of working. [Method] Based on the design science research, we highlight critical challenges collected from a workshop and eight interviews. Aiming to find applicable solutions such as artifacts, practices, methods, or tools, we also validate those solutions by conducting five evaluations sessions. [Result] The end result is a new artifact that we call a requirement strategy and two other supplements: technical templates and traceability tools. We conclude that using the requirements engineering approach allows us to solve several challenges. In our case we produce a powerful artifact aiming to help agile teams especially if they are working with large-scale agile system development, the solution might be generalized to companies that are developing large scale software systems. Also, it is an encouragement to the industry to use requirement engineering even if they are using agile methodologies.