Road to agile requirements engineering: Lessons learned from a web app project

Abstract

This chapter describes the research project Companion conducted at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland FHNW and its relationship to the research area Agile Requirements Engineering (ARE). ARE aims to establish requirements engineering practices, which are customized for agile development methodologies such like Scrum, XP, etc. Within the Companion project a Web App was developed to promote mental health of adolescents taking their first steps into working life. The description starts by giving some key information about the project, its context, the development of the Web App and the weaknesses observed during software engineering activities. Next, classical requirements engineering and ARE are compared and specific challenges for ARE based on experiences from the industry are presented. For the challenges in ARE, specific practices have been proposed which are described together with their limitations. This chapter ends with a selection of adequate ARE practices which may increase the performance of software engineering in situations similar to the context of the Companion project.