Defining Requirements Strategies in Agile: A Design Science Research Study

TL;DR

Addresses the challenge that agile development often lacks a coherent requirements engineering (RE) strategy. The authors apply design science research across three industrial case studies to design and empirically evaluate guidelines for defining a requirements strategy in agile development. They identify RE challenges, propose multi-faceted solution strategies, and derive three building-block perspectives—structural, organizational, and work/flow—to guide shared understanding and traceability. The resulting artifact offers concrete templates and governance constructs to integrate RE into agile workflows, aiming to improve alignment between customer value and development activities in large-scale settings.

Abstract

Research shows that many of the challenges currently encountered with agile development are related to requirements engineering. Based on design science research, this paper investigates critical challenges that arise in agile development from an undefined requirements strategy. We explore potential ways to address these challenges and synthesize the key building blocks of requirements strategies. Our design science research rests on a multiple case study with three industrial cases in the domains of communication technology, security services, and automotive. We relied on a total of 20 interviews, two workshops, participant observation in two cases, and document analysis in each of the cases to understand concrete challenges and workflows. In each case, we define a requirements strategy in collaboration with process managers and experienced engineers. From this experience, we extract guidelines for defining requirements strategies in agile development.