Requirements Engineering Practice and Problems in Agile Projects: Results from an International Survey

TL;DR

This survey study provides empirical insights into agile requirements engineering practices and challenges across organizations, highlighting common techniques, issues, and similarities with traditional RE.

Contribution

It offers the first comprehensive empirical analysis of agile RE practices and problems based on responses from 92 organizations worldwide.

Findings

Agile RE focuses on free-text documentation and traceability.

Organizations align testing with requirements and continuously improve RE.

Common problems include unclear requirements and communication issues.

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is considerably different in agile development than in more traditional development processes. Yet, there is little empirical knowledge on the state of the practice and contemporary problems in agile RE. As part of a bigger survey initiative (Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering), we build an empirical basis on such aspects of agile RE. Based on the responses of representatives from 92 different organisations, we found that agile RE concentrates on free-text documentation of requirements elicited with a variety of techniques. Often, traces between requirements and code are explicitly managed and also software testing and RE are aligned. Furthermore, continuous improvement of RE is performed due to intrinsic motivation. Important experienced problems include unclear requirements and communication flaws. Overall, we found that most organisations conduct RE in a way we would expect and that agile RE is in several aspects not so different from RE in other development processes.