Customer communication challenges in Agile Requirements Engineering

Abstract: Context and background: Requirements engineering(RE) is a first and a very important phase in any software development which helps in building a suitable and customer satisfactory product. In the past few years, the use of Agile software development has become popular in the industry. Customer communication plays an important role in any software development life cycle. Customers state the requirements needed to develop a product in the Requirements Engineering phase. A project is likely to fail due to problems in customer communication during the RE phase. Objective: This thesis aims to study the Customer communication challenges in Agile requirements engineering, prioritize these challenges, and also find out the mitigation strategies to overcome these challenges. Research Method: A systematic mapping study is conducted to find out the customer communication challenges. Based on the data collected from the systematic mapping study, a survey is conducted to find out the mitigation strategies to overcome the customer communication challenges faced in the RE phase and also prioritize these challenges. Results: Based on the data collected from the systematic mapping study, a total of 18 customer communication challenges are identified. In the second step, a survey is conducted based on the identified challenges. The prioritization of these challenges is done by calculating the risk analysis of the challenges from the survey data. And finally, mitigation strategies are mentioned to overcome all the identified 18 challenges.