Articles details

  • Requirements Specification for Developers in Agile Projects: Evaluation by two Industrial Case Studies
  • 01 Sep 2019
  • Context:An inadequate requirements specification activity acts as a catalyst to other problems, such as low teamproductivity and difficulty in maintaining software. Although Agile Software Development (ASD) has grown in recentyears, research pointed out several limitations concerning its requirements engineering activities, such as Software Re-quirements Specification (SRS) provided in high level and targeted to the customer, lack of information required toperform design activities and low availability of the customer. To overcome these issues, the RSD (Requirements Speci-fication for Developers) approach was proposed to create an SRS that provides information closer to development needs.In addition, existing literature reviews identify a demand for more empirical studies on the requirements specificationactivity in ASD.Objective:Face to this, this work presents the evaluation of the RSD approach with respect to how itaffects the teamwork and to identify its strengths and limitations.Methods:This evaluation was performed by meansof two industrial case studies conducted using a multiple-case design, focusing on software engineers as the analysis unit.Data were collected during 15 months from documents, observations, and interviews. They were triangulated, analyzed,and synthesized using techniques of grounded theory.Results:The findings pointed out that the readability of SRSwas compromised when several requirements are specified in the same RSD artifact. Evaluation also indicated the needof prioritization and categorization of the acceptance criteria, a tool for creating, searching and tracing the artifacts,and obtaining acceptance tests from acceptance criteria. On the other hand, the findings showed that the practices usedto specify requirements using the RSD approach have the potential to produce a more objective SRS, tailored for thedevelopment team.Conclusions:As a consequence, the structure of the RSD artifact was considered as a factor thatimproved the team performance in the two case studies.
  • Information of Software and Technology
  • Elsevier
  • Juliana Medeiros, Alexandre Vasconcelos, Carla Silva, Miguel Goulão
  • 1 Sep 2019