Abstract
Background: In Agile Software Development context, Requirements Engineering (RE) is an important process that happens continuously during the iterations of a product. To be able to deliver value, the teams should perform requirements validation to assure that they meet user’s expectations, and also foster the collaboration between stakeholders and developers. Despite this understanding, there are still few studies that provide empirical data that make it possible to generalize the aspects, practices, and difficulties found by the teams that perform validation of agile requirements. Goal: The goal of this work is to understand how the requirements validation activities are being put in practice by companies of the Brazilian software industry that adopt agile methodologies. Method: We carried out an online survey, involving 117 participants. Our instrument focused on identifying the most used requirements artefacts, and what are the main difficulties in adopting these practices. Results: The results of our study reported that (i) user stories and prototypes are the most used artefacts, (ii) teams usually validate requirements by running systematic refinement meetings, and (iii) the development team and Product Owner are the most popular roles that attend to these sessions. Conclusion: The analysis reveals that agile teams are running requirements validation sessions as part of their development processes but they still face general RE problems, like the lack of stakeholders engagement or stakeholders that have different business visions of the same product. These results also contribute with information that allows future studies focused on the improvement of agile requirements validation.
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Cursino, R., Farias, J., Lancastre, M., Santos, W. (2019). Agile Requirements Validation in Brazilian Software Development Companies: A Survey. In: Tonin, G., Estácio, B., Goldman, A., Guerra, E. (eds) Agile Methods. WBMA 2018. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 981. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14310-7_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14310-7_1
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