Requirements Engineering in an Agile Environment

Abstract: The Requirements Engineering (RE) process often dominates the quality of a project.The requirement practices in a project team are supposed to be an important part ofthe whole software development process. Today lean and agile development isbecoming more and more popular in industry. Many project teams work in an agileenvironment in order to have rapid delivery of high-quality software. Usually the workof the teams adopting an agile methodology is flexible and changeable. This indicatesthat the requirements of the projects might also be frequently changed, which is avariation to the traditional RE that relies on long and detailed documentation. This thesis investigates how to conduct a RE process under an agile environment – sothat there exist relatively formal but agile and changeable requirements within aproject. The methods planned to be used are literature study, a case study carriedout in two software development teams in the Test Tool & Support Section at SonyEricsson Mobile Communications AB, and one pilot in each team based on the casestudy. There were 11 employees interviewed, including eight developers, two productowners and one scrum master. The evaluation on the pilots was mainly based on thefeedback from the interviewees on the pilot. The outcome of the evaluation was that one of the teams (BRAT team) should adoptuser stories for user-related requirements, “done criteria” and non-functionalrequirements, and have the product owner to do the demonstration during the sprintreview in the future. Also, when budget allows, they should have one or morefull-time testers in the team and formal documentation of the requirements. Besidesthe suggestion for the BRAT team, QC team was suggested to have a glossary,formalize the defect description and have the product owner to ask the customersfor the feedbacks on the developers’ thoughts about the uncertain requirements.