Agile Requirements
Ever since agile first emerged in the 1990s, there has been debate about what role, if any, requirements engineering (RE) can play for agile practitioners and their customers. That agile development needs requirements is not disputed, but the relevance of the assumptions, methodologies, techniques and tools that make up the discipline that has become known as RE, is. Thus, while agile emphasizes incremental discovery and satisfaction cycles with face-to-face interaction rather than documentation, RE has traditionally stressed full understanding of requirements before commitment to coding and rigorously maintained, version-managed and traced requirements documents. Yet both of these views are stereotypes, rendered even less valid by the evolution that has occurred in both the agile and RE worlds. Thus, for example, techniques have emerged from the RE community for dealing with volatile domains where the requirements can’t be fully known before coding begins; sometimes not even before deployment. Similarly techniques have been developed in the agile community for modelling, structuring, and analyzing requirements knowledge.
The aim of the Agile RE workshop is to take stock of the two worldviews to discover whether agile needs RE, and whether novel RE practices can deliver what agile needs.
The workshop will invite submissions of short papers (up to 6 pages) describing experiences, challenges, vision, and ideas on the need for, or use of requirements engineering techniques in agile software development projects. Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
- New requirements techniques aimed at supporting agile development
- New agile development techniques incorporating novel requirements handling
- Evaluations of requirements techniques with implications for the support of agile development
- Evaluations of agile development with implications for requirements handling
- Experience reports of requirements handling in agile development
- Position statements on the relationship between RE and agile development
All papers will be reviewed by three or more members of the programme committee. Accepted papers will be presented and discussed during the workshop. The paper presentation will be short to give more time to discussion. Will accept only a small number of papers (perhaps up to 6). We will use the paper presentations to draw out themes for discussion; these might be issues needing more research, factors inhibiting industry take-up or just points of mutual benefit to the RE and agile communities. The bulk of the day will be spent in interactive, plenary and group discussions of these themes, with the aim of identifying an agenda for further research, technology transfer or for better communication and dissemination.
Agile RE workshop report.. (here)