Investigating Communication with Stakeholders in Agile Requirements Engineering
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Typ
Examensarbete för masterexamen
Master Thesis
Master Thesis
Program
Software engineering and technology (MPSOF), MSc
Publicerad
2017
Författare
Megdad, Mohammed
Modellbyggare
Tidskriftstitel
ISSN
Volymtitel
Utgivare
Sammanfattning
Background: It is unclear how Requirement Engineering (RE) and Agile Software Development (ASD) can work together. Several studies have investigated this phenomenon, and their results show several challenges in using RE and ASD, such as communication gaps. However, there is a scarcity of publications that provide empirical data on the combination of RE and ASD. Objective: The purpose of this research is to investigate the challenges of using RE-related activities in ASD and how these challenges affect the communication with stakeholders. Method: A case study method is used to investigate the IT department in a large organization, the Swedish public employment agency Arbetsförmedlingen (AF). Data were collected through twelve semi-structured interviews, telephone interviews, and email contact. Additionally, tools such as Jira was used to investigate the quality of requirements whereas Usabilla was accessed to examine the feedback received from external stakeholders. Results: Several challenges from implementing RE-related activities in ASD were discovered such as clarity of requirements and using customer representatives. Some of these challenges relate to a purely agile context and are impacted by a lack of adoption of agile practices. Others are more generic for RE and are likely to occur also in non-agile environments. The discovered challenges have a negative impact on the communication with different stakeholders, which negatively affects the development process. Conclusion: The results indicate that physical communication with customers plays a significant role in the quality of the delivered products, but the customer representatives are unable to play the role of the customer in the development process. Furthermore, our results show the importance of understanding agile practices on all levels, including the management and customers.
Beskrivning
Ämne/nyckelord
Data- och informationsvetenskap , Computer and Information Science