The AgileRE workshop aimed to foster the interaction between practitioners and academics concerning the current state of the art and practice of agile requirements engineering. Through a keynote, presentations from industry and academia, and hands-on tutorials, the participants presented contrasting views on the future of requirements engineering in agile environments.
CEUR ceur-ws.org
https://www.uu.nl/staff/FDalpiaz (F. Dalpiaz); https://jpsteghofer.net/ (J. Steghöfer)
© 2024 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). of the art and practice of agile requirements engineering. Based on presentations from industry and academia and interlaced with hands-on tutorials, the participants exchanged experience and views on how organizations that employ agile development handle requirements, what scaling means for agile RE, and what the future of requirements engineering in agile environments will hold.
AgileRE was open to all topics that pertain to the agile way of working with requirements. In our call for papers, we particularly solicited contributions around the following topics: • Documentation of requirements; • RE-related activities and ceremonies in agile development; • Shared understanding, also through non-linguistic artifacts; • RE phases prior to the definition of the backlog; • AI techniques that can be used to support Agile RE practitioners; • Studies on the transition to or away from agile development; • Role of models and modeling paradigms; • Experiments and case studies; • Agile RE education and training; • New or revised theories of RE in agile settings.
To attract both academics and practitioners, we welcomed a diverse range of contributions, including classic papers (appearing in these proceedings), paperless presentations, and minitutorials. We envisioned tutorials as a way to teach the participating audience an interesting RE technique in a concise and entertaining format.
The program committee of AgileRE consisted of a mix of academics and industry practitioners. Each submitted paper received three reviews, while submitted talks that do not appear in the proceedings include at least two reviews. We are very grateful for the high quality of reviews our submissions received. The PC consisted of: • Konstantinos Tsilionis, TU Eindhoven, Netherlands • Michael Unterkalmsteiner, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden • Gerard Wagenaar, Utrecht University, Netherlands • Michael Wahler, Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), Switzerland • Yves Wautelet, KU Leuven, Belgium
The workshop included four sessions of 90 minutes each, in line with the tradition for workshops at the REFSQ conference.
Session 1. After an introduction by the organizers, the first session featured an invited talk by Markus Meuten entitled “A farewell or a new direction? The future of requirements engineering in the agile era.”, which discussed the challenges of RE in agile contexts and how the publicly available Req42 framework (https://req42.de/en/req42-at-a-glance) supports agile requirements engineering.
Session 2. The session included one paperless presentation and two papers; the latter two are part of the proceedings: • Agile transition – Who owns the requirements? Andrea Wohlgemuth (SwissLog) gave an experience report regarding the notion of responsibility for requirements in agile setups within the (intra-)logistics context; • What’s Ready in a DoR? Rationales, Responsibility & Rules in using a Definition of Ready.
Mark van Riesen and Gerard Wagenaar (Utrecht University) presented results about the concept of Definition of Ready that they derived from a literature review and a case study; • Cartooneering – Using Comics and Personas to Enable the Definition of a Software Product Vision. Simon Andre Scherr (Fraunhofer IESE) and colleagues introduced Cartooneering, a graphical scenario-building technique based on proto-personas and comics, which supports the creation of a shared vision.
Session 3. This session was dedicated to two tutorials on specific techniques: • Agile RE by Lean Six Sigma – how AI techniques can be used to support Agile RE practitioners.
Thomas Fehlmann and Eberhard Kranich (Euro Project Ofice AG) introduced the use of the ISO 16355 for improving agile product development by using statistical methods for requirements engineering, including understanding customer needs and focusing agile development on customer needs. • The Headstand Method. Luise Büscher and Nadine Porkert (XITASO GmbH) presented the use of a method for creative brainstorming that relies on framing a problem in reverse or negative terms in order to generate new (and less obvious) ideas, especially in early requirements engineering.
Session 4. This session included another mini-tutorial, which was then followed by a final discussion. The mini-tutorial was: • Applying a Grey Multi–Criteria Decision Making Method to Agile Requirements. Thomas Fehlmann and Eberhard Kranich (Euro Project Ofice AG) presented the use of multicriteria decision-making techniques based on Grey Systems Theory, which allow to perform prioritization in settings where only partial information is available.
Overall, the diverse program and the positive reaction to the workshop show that Agile requirements engineering remains an important topic for the RE community and that academics and practitioners continue to refine the methods used in this area.