Agile Islands in a Waterfall Environment: Requirements Engineering Challenges and Strategies in Automotive

TL;DR

This paper explores the challenges faced by agile requirements engineering within traditional waterfall environments in automotive large-scale systems, highlighting the need for strategies to bridge the methodological gap.

Contribution

It presents an exploratory case study identifying challenges and proposing potential strategies for requirements engineering in hybrid agile-waterfall settings.

Findings

Agile teams struggle with high-level requirement awareness

Flexibility in writing user stories causes challenges

Most strategies for overcoming these challenges are still lacking

Abstract

[Context & motivation] Driven by the need for faster time-to-market and reduced development lead-time, large-scale systems engineering companies are adopting agile methods in their organizations. This agile transformation is challenging and it is common that adoption starts bottom-up with agile software teams within the context of traditional company structures. [Question/Problem] This creates the challenge of agile teams working within a document-centric and plan-driven (or waterfall) environment. While it may be desirable to take the best of both worlds, it is not clear how that can be achieved especially with respect to managing requirements in large-scale systems. [Principal ideas/Results] This paper presents an exploratory case study at an automotive company, focusing on two departments of a large-scale systems company that is in the process of company-wide agile adoption. [Contribution] We present challenges related to requirements engineering that agile teams face while working within a larger plan-driven context and propose potential strategies to mitigate the challenges. Challenges relate to, e.g., development teams not being aware of the high-level requirement and dealing with flexibility of writing user stories. We found that strategies for overcoming most of these challenges are still lacking and thus call for more research.