| 1. |
- Kasauli, Rashida, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Requirements Engineering Challenges in Large-Scale Agile System Development
- 2017
-
Ingår i: International Requirements Engineering Conference. - : IEEE. - 9781538631911 ; , s. 352-361
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agile methods have proven their value to accelerate delivery of high quality software products and services to customers. End-users have become used to regular updates that fix bugs and provide new features and for software products, short time-to-market has become an important business driver. In order to remain competitive, more and more companies imple- ment agile methods and their practices also for software-intense, large products, such as cars, telecommunication infrastructure, and embedded systems. Development of such system usually relies on plan-driven, stage-gate processes and is subject to safety and regulative concerns. Consequently, requirements engineering involves upfront and detailed analysis, which can be at odds with agile (software) development. In this paper, we present results from a multiple case study with two car manufacturers, a telecommunications company, and a technology company that are on the journey to introduce organization wide continuous integration and continuous delivery to customers. Based on 20 qualitative interviews, 5 focus groups, and 2 cross-company workshops, we discuss possible scopes of agile methods within system development, the consequences this has on the role of requirements, and the challenges that arise from the interplay of requirements engineering and agile methods in large-scale system development. These relate in particular to communicating and managing knowledge about a) customer value and b) the system under development. We argue that better alignment of a holistic requirements model with agile development practices promises rich gains in development speed, flexibility, and overall quality of software and systems.
|
|
| 2. |
- Knauss, Eric, 1977, et al.
(författare)
-
Quality Requirements in Agile as a Knowledge Management Problem: More than Just-in-Time
- 2017
-
Ingår i: 2nd International Workshop on Just-In-Time Requirements Engineering: Dealing with Non-Functional Requirements in Agile Software Development (JITRE@RE17). - : IEEE. - 9781538634882
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Just-in-time (JIT) approaches have been suggested for managing non-functional requirements in agile projects. However, many non-functional requirements cannot be raised and met on the spot. In this position paper, we argue that effective JIT engineering of quality requirements depends on a solid foundation of long-term knowledge about all relevant quality requirements. We present two examples from projects related to safety and security and show that not all aspects of these quality requirements can be invented and changed just in time. Further, managing for example operationalization of quality requirements just in time depends on sufficient understanding of (i) customer value and (ii) the system under construction that must be shared by the engineering team. If a Learning Software Organization (LSO) intends to increase agility and speed up system development, it needs a holistic concept for managing this knowledge. We propose that a knowledge-management framework can facilitate JIT-RE by structuring, representing, and allowing updates of long-term knowledge about quality requirements. Such a knowledge-management framework should allow to map user value to system requirements and have important properties to allow JIT RE and sustainable evolution.
|
|
| 3. |
- de Oliveira Neto, Francisco Gomes, et al.
(författare)
-
Challenges of Aligning Requirements Engineering and System Testing in Large-Scale Agile: A Multiple Case Study
- 2017
-
Ingår i: 2017 IEEE 25th International Requirements Engineering Conference Workshops (REW), 4-8 Sept. 2017, Lisbon, Portugal. - : IEEE. - 9781538634882
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Abstract: As agile methods become more pervasive, agile practices are applied to more large-scale systems with a scope that goes beyond pure software. The expansion of agile in these contexts provides benefits, but creates new challenges. Widespread use of agile has changed the way we must think about practices both in Requirements Engineering (RE) and in System Testing (ST). Our experience shows that many challenges in the application of large-scale agile development relate to either RE or ST, and in particular to the alignment between these areas. In this paper we present large-scale agile-related challenges from a multiple case study which relate to REST alignment. We map our challenges to an existing framework for REST alignment, and make an initial attempt to suggest agile RE practices from the literature which may alleviate these challenges. Our results show that the interviewed companies need to first adopt more agile RE practices to enhance REST alignment and then leverage agile testing. Future work will look more towards evaluating these best practices.
|
|
| 4. |
- Kasauli, Rashida, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Adding value every sprint: A case study on large-scale continuous requirements engineering
- 2017
-
Ingår i: CEUR Workshop Proceedings. - 1613-0073. ; 1796
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agile development practices, such as continuous integration and continuous delivery, promise value through shorter time to market and increased exibility. While these practices have been widely adopted in small-scale, they have shown to be challenging to adopt in large-scale, system development. This is often due to a distance between customer and developer in large scale systems, and the need to break down value from the whole system into manageable parts. The notion of value is fundamental for agile methods, especially for practices such as continuous delivery to the customer. However, how value should be handled in development practices is not clearly understood. In this paper, we investigate how the notion of adding value in every sprint has been perceived in a large-scale system development. Based on an exploratory qualitative case study, the outcome shows that it is perceived beneficial by practitioners although it comes at a price and challenges exist.
|
|
| 5. |
- Kasauli, Rashida, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Agile Islands in a Waterfall Environment: Challenges and Strategies in Automotive
- 2020
-
Ingår i: ACM International Conference Proceeding Series. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; , s. 31-40
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Driven by the need for faster time-to-market and reduced development lead-time, large-scale systems engineering companies are adopting agile methods in their organizations. This agile transformation is challenging and it is common that adoption starts bottom-up with agile software teams within the context of traditional company structures. This creates the challenge of agile teams working within a document-centric and plan-driven (or waterfall) environment. While it may be desirable to take the best of both worlds, it is not clear how that can be achieved especially with respect to managing requirements in large-scale systems. This paper presents an exploratory case study focusing on two departments of a large-scale systems engineering company (automotive) that is in the process of company-wide agile adoption. We present challenges that agile teams face while working within a larger plan-driven context and propose potential strategies to mitigate the challenges. Challenges relate to, e.g., development teams not being aware of the high-level requirements, difficulties to manage change of these requirements as well as their relationship to backlog items such as user stories. While we found strategies for solving most of the challenges, they remain abstract and empirical research on their effectiveness is currently lacking.
|
|
| 6. |
- Kasauli, Rashida, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Charting Coordination Needs in Large-Scale Agile Organisations with Boundary Objects and Methodological Islands
- 2020
-
Ingår i: Proceedings - 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software and System Processes, ICSSP 2020. - New York, NY, USA : ACM. ; , s. 51-60
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Large-scale system development companies are increasingly adopting agile methods. While this adoption may improve lead-times, such companies need to balance two trade-offs: (i) the need to have a uniform, consistent development method on system level with the need for specialised methods for teams in different disciplines (e.g., hardware, software, mechanics, sales, support); (ii) the need for comprehensive documentation on system level with the need to have lightweight documentation enabling iterative and agile work. With specialised methods for teams, isolated teams work within larger ecosystems of plan-driven culture, i.e., teams become agile “islands”. At the boundaries, these teams share knowledge which needs to be managed well for a correct system to be developed. While it is useful to support diverse and specialised methods, it is important to understand which islands are repeatedly encountered, the reasons or factors triggering their existence, and how best to handle coordination between them. Based on a multiple case study, this work presents a catalogue of islands and the boundary objects between them. We believe this work will be beneficial to practitioners aiming to understand their ecosystems and researchers addressing communication and coordination challenges in large-scale development.
|
|
| 7. |
- Kasauli, Rashida, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Requirements engineering challenges and practices in large-scale agile system development
- 2021
-
Ingår i: Journal of Systems and Software. - : Elsevier BV. - 0164-1212. ; 172
-
Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context: Agile methods have become mainstream even in large-scale systems engineering companies that need to accommodate different development cycles of hardware and software. For such companies, requirements engineering is an essential activity that involves upfront and detailed analysis which can be at odds with agile development methods. Objective: This paper presents a multiple case study with seven large-scale systems companies, reporting their challenges, together with best practices from industry. We also analyze literature about two popular large-scale agile frameworks, SAFe (R) and LeSS, to derive potential solutions for the challenges. Methods: Our results are based on 20 qualitative interviews, five focus groups, and eight cross company workshops which we used to both collect and validate our results. Results: We found 24 challenges which we grouped in six themes, then mapped to solutions from SAFe (R), LeSS, and our companies, when available. Conclusion: In this way, we contribute a comprehensive overview of RE challenges in relation to largescale agile system development, evaluate the degree to which they have been addressed, and outline research gaps. We expect these results to be useful for practitioners who are responsible for designing processes, methods, or tools for large scale agile development as well as guidance for researchers.
|
|
| 8. |
- Kasauli, Rashida, 1984, et al.
(författare)
-
Requirements engineering challenges and practices in large-scale agile system development
- 2022
-
Ingår i: Accelerating Digital Transformation: 10 Years of Software Center. - 9783031108730 ; , s. 293-350
-
Bokkapitel (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Context: Agile methods have become mainstream even in large-scale systems engineering companies that need to accommodate different development cycles of hardware and software. For such companies, requirements engineering is an essential activity that involves upfront and detailed analysis which can be at odds with agile development methods. Objective: This paper presents a multiple case study with seven large-scale systems companies, reporting their challenges, together with best practices from industry. We also analyse literature about two popular large-scale agile frameworks, SAFe® and LeSS, to derive potential solutions for the challenges. Method: Our results are based on 20 qualitative interviews, five focus groups, and eight cross-company workshops which we used to both collect and validate our results. Results: We found 24 challenges which we grouped in six themes, then mapped to solutions from SAFe®, LeSS, and our companies, when available. Conclusion: In this way, we contribute a comprehensive overview of RE challenges in relation to large-scale agile system development, evaluate the degree to which they have been addressed, and outline research gaps. We expect these results to be useful for practitioners who are responsible for designing processes, methods, or tools for large scale agile development as well as guidance for researchers.
|
|
| 9. |
- Kasauli, Rashida, 1984
(författare)
-
Requirements Engineering Challenges of Supporting Agile Teams in System Development
- 2018
-
Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Context: Agile methods have attracted many companies due to their reported benefits of short time-to-market and improved quality outputs. In the systems development context, additional constraints apply e.g. as a result of scale or parallel development of hardware and software. Traditionally, stage-gate processes with a focus on up-front requirements analysis are common in large- scale systems engineering. These processes clash with the companies’ desire to become more agile. Objective: The aim of this thesis is to discover challenges that new requirements engineering approaches should address to enable agile system devel- opment at scale (RE4Agile). With a focus on value and building system understanding, we explore these challenges from the perspective of the agile development teams. Method: To meet our aim, we conducted a series of empirical studies based on case studies, and a secondary review to explore the problem domain while deriving challenges and potential solutions from industry and literature respectively. Findings: Our findings show that there are numerous challenges of conducting requirements engineering in agile development especially where systems development is concerned. These challenges relate to user value and overall system understanding. However, there are some cross-cutting concerns, e.g safety- critical development, that have generated much interest both from practitioners and academicians at large. Conclusions: The challenges discovered sprout from an integration problem of working with agile methods while using the already existing processes as well. However, solution candidates exist and our future research aims to validate some of the solution candidates in the view of deriving new RE approaches. This thesis contributes to such future research, by establishing a holistic map of challenges that allows to assess whether a given solution is beneficial in the larger context or whether it over-optimizes only one area.
|
|
| 10. |
- Kasauli, Rashida, 1984
(författare)
-
Requirements engineering for large scale agile systems development
- 2017
-
Ingår i: CEUR Workshop Proceedings. - 1613-0073.
-
Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Agile practices such as continuous integration and delivery promise shorter time to market and improved quality. For this reason, such practices have been adopted in many software companies. In the context of systems development, additional constraints apply, e.g., as a result of scale or parallel development of hardware and software. Traditionally, stage-gate processes with a focus on up-front requirements analysis are common in large-scale systems engineering. However, long upfront analysis is considered anti agile and there is some friction between RE (which is often considered as a waterfall activity or phase) and agile practices. This paper describes a research agenda that plans to address this friction. The work proposes a series of empirical studies to discover the information needs and related knowledge, pertinent to product development. We expect to make a contribution by establishing guidelines and frameworks that can be used to make requirements engineering a foundation for agile systems development.
|
|
