Agile requirements prioritization: What happens in practice and what is described in literature

Abstract

[Context & motivation] Requirements (re)prioritization is an essential mechanism of agile development approaches to maximize the value for the clients and to accommodate changing requirements. Yet, in the agile Requirements Engineering (RE) literature, very little is known about how agile (re)prioritization happens in practice. [Question/problem] To gain better understanding of prioritization practices, we analyzed the real-life processes as well as the guidance that the literature provides. We compare the results of a literature research with the results of a multiple case study that we used to create a conceptual model of the prioritization process. We set out to answer the research question: "Which concepts of agile prioritization are shared in practice and in literature and how they are used to provide guidance for prioritization". [Results] The case study yielded a conceptual model of the inter-iteration prioritization process. Further, we achieved a mapping between the concepts from the model and the existing prioritization techniques, described by several authors. [Contribution] The model contributes to the body of knowledge in agile RE. It makes explicit the concepts that practitioners tacitly use in the agile prioritization process. We use this for structuring the mapping study with the literature and plan to use it for analyzing, supporting, and improving the process in agile projects. The mapping gives us a clear understanding of the 'deviation' between the existing methods as prescribed in literature and the processes we observe in real life. It helps to identify which of the concepts are used explicitly by other authors/ methods. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.