=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1796/ds-paper-3
|storemode=property
|title=Requirements Engineering for Large Scale Agile Systems Development
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1796/ds-paper-3.pdf
|volume=Vol-1796
|authors=Rashidah Kasauli
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/refsq/Kasauli17
}}
==Requirements Engineering for Large Scale Agile Systems Development==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1796/ds-paper-3.pdf
Requirements Engineering for Large Scale Agile
Systems Development?
Rashidah Kasauli
Chalmers | University of Gothenburg, Sweden
rashida@chalmers.se
Abstract. Agile practices such as continuous integration and delivery
promise shorter time to market and improved quality. For this reason,
such practices have been adopted in many software companies. In the
context of systems development, additional constraints apply, e.g., as a
result of scale or parallel development of hardware and software. Tra-
ditionally, stage-gate processes with a focus on up-front requirements
analysis are common in large-scale systems engineering. However, long
upfront analysis is considered anti agile and there is some friction be-
tween RE (which is often considered as a waterfall activity or phase)
and agile practices. This paper describes a research agenda that plans
to address this friction. The work proposes a series of empirical studies
to discover the information needs and related knowledge, pertinent to
product development. We expect to make a contribution by establish-
ing guidelines and frameworks that can be used to make requirements
engineering a foundation for agile systems development.
Keywords: agile requirements, requirements and continuous integra-
tion, systems engineering, software-intensive systems
1 Introduction
Large-scale systems development companies are operating in increasingly com-
petitive and dynamic markets. These new business challenges call for a product
development process which is able to respond faster to changing situations. For
this reason, large systems development companies have adopted agile methods
[13, 19], like scrum and XP, which offer the promise of faster time to market and
improved quality [17].
Agile methods, which were originally designed for small teams, have been
applied successfully but with challenges in large organizations [10]. To combat
these challenges, suggestions for companies to build and tailor these methods
to operate in other environments [8, 20] came up, while others suggested the
combination of agile and traditional methods [11, 13, 15, 17].
At the same time Requirements Engineering (RE), which is necessary for
project success [7], is seen as a traditional or plan-driven process [14]. This might
?
Copyright 2017 for this paper by its authors. Copying permitted for private and
academic purposes.
be acceptable, since some claim that product development companies cannot be
fully agile [9], as parts of the product development (e.g. hardware) have to remain
mainly plan-driven. Although claimed beneficial, the role of RE practices in agile
methods is still unclear to the software development community[7]. There is little
work on how RE and agile methods interact in a software-intensive systems
development environment.
Based on that, we start by exploring the area of RE with two large-scale
software intensive companies that are using agile methods in their development
process. We then derive, based on actual industry needs and related work, the
specific research goals we have and derive a research agenda to address the
friction between RE and agile methods.
2 Progress so far
As a starting point, using semi-structured interviews and workshops, we have
explored the problem in one telecommunications company and one automotive
company. We found that companies are using agile methods and want to adapt
the new agile strategy of continuous delivery and deployment. Thus increasing
the focus on value creation. In this situation, there is a pattern, where teams
receive the high level requirements which they break down into user stories to be
implemented in each sprint. However, there are some discrepancies that prevent
the delivery of value. Through thematic analysis of the transcribed interviews,
we identified several discrepancies. The following are the key results that relate
to this thesis.
Gap between customer and developer: The agile methods advocate face-to-face
communication between the customers and developers. However, that is practi-
cally impossible in the large-scale context as the customer base for large-scale
companies is quite wide and distributed in most, if not all, cases. Developers
complain that the levels between them and the customers are so many that
there is so much value lost by the time the requirements get to them. Also devel-
opers complain that they are not given access to the requirements early enough,
thus increasing the probability of misinterpreting the requirements. The earlier
the programmers participate in requirements engineering process, the less the
risk of developing the wrong product.
Information flow supporting agility: Since the direct communication between
developer and customer is very complex, there is concern and therefore a need
to address the way the information should flow to (and) or from and within the
organization. To receive requirements, the levels within the organizations use
varying tools or artifacts that cause a loss of value during conversion. Developers
for instance use user stories as a way of communication among themselves which
the product owners may not understand. After development, the customers are
unable to try out the products in a short time for timely feedback. They still
find a need to go through their long verification cycles. This could be because of
the lack of avenues to give them an easy way to try out features early enough
or the lack of documentation to guarantee quality of the release.
Managing documentation requirements: For software-intensive systems, the reg-
ulatory requirements are one of the primary factors. These regulations and poli-
cies, which guide the development of certain software components, require some
sorts of documentation to back them up. Agile methods, however, do not provide
for handling such requirements.
These challenges are all addressing the conflicts that agile ways of working
have with the traditional RE practices. The far away customer as opposed to
on-site customer for agile methods, the lack of emphasis on documentation as
opposed to specific documents for knowledge sharing in the traditional ways all
disturb the flow of information between stakeholders. So the general question for
this thesis is: In what way can RE be modified to complement the agile process
of development?
The remainder of the paper discusses related work, research aim, methodol-
ogy and gives a conclusion.
3 Related Work
The applicability of agile methods in large-scale development of software in-
tensive systems is challenging [6] as there are some misalignments between the
agile methods and the already established requirements management processes
[17]. This could be because the implementation of the original agile ideas is not
practical in the context of large-scale companies which have already set up a
traditional foundation.
RE is a process by which the services that the customer requires from a
system and the constraints under which it operates are established. Traditionally,
during the RE process, a requirements document was created for knowledge
sharing [12]. In contrast, agile methods advocate for face-to-face communication
[1] between stakeholders to reach a similar goal. Several studies [13, 15, 19] have,
however, indicated the use a surrogate customer in the large-scale context which
introduces requirements communication challenges [4, 11] that could also impact
the quality of the product being developed [2]. Bjarnasson et al. [2] particularly
pointed out low understanding of each others’ roles and the scale of organization
and product as some of the major causes of communication gaps.
To answer the question of scaling agile methods, Ronkainen and Abrahams-
son [16] explored the possibility of using agile development techniques in a sys-
tems development environment and defined requirements for new agile methods
targeted to facilitate the development of embedded software. They provide tech-
niques to handle issues of documentation, software architecture, experimentation
and test-driven development. These proposals were not tried out and there is no
apparent research to show which techniques were developed. This research in-
tends to expound on that and develop the techniques to enhance RE in the
embedded systems domain.
To further try to understand agile methods in large-scale, more studies [3,
5] have been done. Eklund et al., for instance, [5] conducted a study in which
they identified industrial challenges of scaling agile to embedded systems devel-
opment. Among those identified was the length of the feedback loops between
customers and management and handling of specific product requirements. These
are consistent with our findings in Sec.2.
Despite the fact that works have come out to identify these challenges, not
much has been done to address them. Some works [8, 20] have proposed modi-
fication of the agile methods to fit the environment but the actual processes or
practices or frameworks for modification are not given.
4 Research Aim
The aim of this research is to design a framework that consists of RE tech-
niques that are suitable for requirements engineers to enhance the value provided
through handling documentation and regulations in software-intensive systems
development while also supporting agile development, continuous integration,
and continuous deployment.
4.1 Research Questions
As a starting point, we focus on the practices and processes in use by asking the
following questions:
RQ A What practices can be used to manage documentation without
compromising the agile structure?
Since documentation serves both internal for (effective information flow between
stakeholders) and external purposes (quality assurance) to capture both we fur-
ther break it down into:
RQ 1 In what way can information flow be managed so that a project
organization consistently maintains value and keeps a competitive
edge in product?
This can be broken down into other research questions:
RQ 1A What processes ensure that all stakeholders get the same
understanding of the requirements in order to deliver value?
RQ 1B What practices for managing user stories ensure that the stories
contain strategic value for a given sprint?
RQ 2 How can agile methods be extended to cater for the quality
(regulatory) requirements in software intensive systems?
4.2 Expected Contributions
The research expects to contribute to the body of knowledge of tailoring RE and
agile methods to work in the systems engineering context. The contribution will
be through frameworks addressing how RE should be structured and executed
to cope with the possibly unique challenges in embedded systems development.
Focus will be specifically in regards to:
1. Requirements flow in the organization from customer to release — to help
firms manage a unified understanding of value in the organization.
2. Documentation requirements handling — to help firms deal with the regu-
latory requirements in an agile setting.
5 Research Method
5.1 Reserch design and data collection
The research will follow the research approach proposed by Sein et al. [18].
Having identified the problems to address, the researcher will have extensive
interviews, focus group meetings and workshops with the stakeholders in the
participating companies. That will be followed with analysis of the results to
devise the best framework that can work for the stakeholders.
This research will build on the foundation of related work, which have been
gathered and synthesized in relation to RE [7] in the systems agile development
environment [16] with special attention to providing a working solution at all
levels of abstraction from the customer needs over system requirements, sub-
system requirements, down to software requirements, their implementation and
then up again through the different integration and testing steps while still
working agile.
As Inayat et al. [7] recommended, more empirical research is needed in agile
RE to better understand the impact of the practices in dealing with quality and
self-organizing teams, the main research methods will be empirical in nature.
Case studies will be used to conduct exploratory study of the current status
of operation and find areas that require improvement. This exploratory study
will be guided by the research questions. The units of analysis will be embed-
ded systems software firms in the fields of telecommunications, automotive and
heavy machinery. The research addresses challenges in the software development
process and therefore we have identified the stakeholders in this research to be
the developing teams, product owners or project managers and the testers.
Triangulation will be needed in order to establish and generalize the chal-
lenges from the different domains. Qualitative data will be derived from inter-
views with identified stakeholders in the different firms. A combination of in
depth interviews with open ended questions, focus groups and workshops will
be used when confronting the firm representatives. Document analysis will be
another possible data source.
5.2 Validity
This research is part of a bigger project with many experienced researchers with
varying backgrounds. We plan to have atleast two interviewers per session to
reduce the risk of bias and misinterpretation. To ensure shared understanding
of interview questions, we plan to start each interview with an introduction
part in which we share our understanding of the subject with the interviewee.
Anonymity will be guaranteed to the interviewees to ensure practitioners are not
threatened to express their opinions. The results of the study may be limited to
the case companies. However, we aim to expand our research to other companies
dealing in different types of products. Triangulation will be used Each company’s
characteristics will be presented to the readers
6 Conclusion and Plan
It is important for RE to be done rightly for the projects to be successful. In the
advent of agile practices like continuous integration and delivery, firms should
be able to fully reap their benefits without completely getting rid of their old
ways but to tailor their methods to fully support the agile ways of working. The
approaches or frameworks to achieve that purpose are still lacking and need to
be explored.
Currently the researcher is on the verge of completing her initial problem
analysis and identification of challenges relating to agile development in the
software-intensive system context and is planning for an empirical study to an-
alyze the problem yet deeper through engagement with the companies. Once it
has been done, the researcher will analyze the data collected and triangulate to
devise a solution.
Acknowledgments. This research is funded by SIDA Bright project and partly
supported by the Software Center (Large-Scale RE project) of Chalmers Uni-
versity of Technology, Sweden.
References
1. Beck, K., Beedle, M., Van Bennekum, A., Cockburn, A., Cunningham, W., Fowler,
M., Grenning, J., Highsmith, J., Hunt, A., Jeffries, R., et al.: Manifesto for agile
software development (2001)
2. Bjarnason, E., Wnuk, K., Regnell, B.: Requirements are slipping through the gapsa
case study on causes & effects of communication gaps in large-scale software de-
velopment. In: 2011 IEEE 19th international requirements engineering conference.
pp. 37–46. IEEE (2011)
3. Daneva, M., Damian, D., Marchetto, A., Pastor, O.: Empirical research method-
ologies and studies in requirements engineering: How far did we come? Journal of
systems and software 95, 1–9 (2014)
4. Dikert, K., Paasivaara, M., Lassenius, C.: Challenges and success factors for large-
scale agile transformations: A systematic literature review. Journal of Systems and
Software (2016)
5. Eklund, U., Olsson, H.H., Strøm, N.J.: Industrial challenges of scaling agile in
mass-produced embedded systems. In: International Conference on Agile Software
Development. pp. 30–42. Springer (2014)
6. Heikkila, V.T., Damian, D., Lassenius, C., Paasivaara, M.: A mapping study on
requirements engineering in agile software development. In: 41st Euromicro Conf.
on Softw. Eng. and Advanced Applications (SEAA ’15). pp. 199–207 (2015)
7. Inayat, I., Salim, S.S., Marczak, S., Daneva, M., Shamshirband, S.: A systematic
literature review on agile requirements engineering practices and challenges. Com-
puters in human behavior 51, 915–929 (2015)
8. Kahkonen, T.: Agile methods for large organizations-building communities of prac-
tice. In: Agile Development Conference, 2004. pp. 2–10. IEEE (2004)
9. Karlström, D., Runeson, P.: Integrating agile software development into stage-gate
managed product development. Empirical Softw. Eng. 11(2), 203–225 (2006)
10. Kettunen, P., Laanti, M.: Combining agile software projects and large-scale or-
ganizational agility. Software Process: Improvement and Practice 13(2), 183–193
(2008)
11. Laanti, M., Salo, O., Abrahamsson, P.: Agile methods rapidly replacing traditional
methods at nokia: A survey of opinions on agile transformation. Information and
Software Technology 53(3), 276–290 (2011)
12. Lucia, A.D., Qusef, A.: Requirements engineering in agile software development.
Journal of Emerging Technologies in Web Intelligence 2(3), 212–220 (2010)
13. Olsson, H.H., Alahyari, H., Bosch, J.: Climbing the” stairway to heaven”–a
mulitiple-case study exploring barriers in the transition from agile development
towards continuous deployment of software. In: 2012 38th Euromicro Conference
on Software Engineering and Advanced Applications. pp. 392–399. IEEE (2012)
14. Paetsch, F., Eberlein, A., Maurer, F.: Requirements engineering and agile software
development. In: null. p. 308. IEEE (2003)
15. Rohunen, A., Rodriguez, P., Kuvaja, P., Krzanik, L., Markkula, J.: Approaches
to agile adoption in large settings: a comparison of the results from a literature
analysis and an industrial inventory. In: PROFES’10. pp. 77–91. Springer (2010)
16. Ronkainen, J., Abrahamsson, P.: Software development under stringent hardware
constraints: do agile methods have a chance? In: XP’03. pp. 73–79. Springer (2003)
17. Savolainen, J., Kuusela, J., Vilavaara, A.: Transition to agile development-
rediscovery of important requirements engineering practices. In: 2010 18th IEEE
International Requirements Engineering Conference. pp. 289–294. IEEE (2010)
18. Sein, M.K., Henfridsson, O., Purao, S., Rossi, M., Lindgren, R.: Action design
research. MIS quarterly pp. 37–56 (2011)
19. Sekitoleko, N., Evbota, F., Knauss, E., Sandberg, A., Chaudron, M., Olsson, H.H.:
Technical dependency challenges in large-scale agile software development. In: In-
ternational Conference on Agile Software Development. pp. 46–61. Springer (2014)
20. Sillitti, A., Succi, G.: Requirements engineering for agile methods. In: Engineering
and Managing Software Requirements, pp. 309–326. Springer (2005)