A Quality Framework for Agile Requirements: A Practitioner's Perspective

TL;DR

This paper proposes a new quality framework tailored for verifying agile requirements, addressing their unique characteristics like incompleteness and ambiguity, and validates it through practitioner feedback.

Contribution

It introduces a novel agile requirements quality framework specifically designed for feature requests and user stories, adapting traditional verification to agile contexts.

Findings

Positive practitioner feedback on the framework

Framework effectively addresses agile requirements challenges

Initial validation supports framework's applicability

Abstract

Verification activities are necessary to ensure that the requirements are specified in a correct way. However, until now requirements verification research has focused on traditional up-front requirements. Agile or just-in-time requirements are by definition incomplete, not specific and might be ambiguous when initially specified, indicating a different notion of 'correctness'. We analyze how verification of agile requirements quality should be performed, based on literature of traditional and agile requirements. This leads to an agile quality framework, instantiated for the specific requirement types of feature requests in open source projects and user stories in agile projects. We have performed an initial qualitative validation of our framework for feature requests with eight practitioners from the Dutch agile community, receiving overall positive feedback.