Communication and Documentation Practices in Agile Requirements Engineering: A Survey in Polish Software Industry

Abstract

Requirements engineering, system analysis and other analytical activities form the basis of every IT project. Such activities are not clearly defined in Agile development methods, but it does not mean that they are absent in an agile project. The aim of our work was to determine which practices related to requirements-related communication and which requirements documenting techniques are used in agile software projects. For this reason we carried out a survey study targeting agile practitioners from Polish IT industry. The paper presents survey results, discusses the noticed differences with respect to the general Agile values and principles and provides a comparison to results of similar studies described in the related work. The main observation about communication practices is that frequent, face to face communication is the most common, but many respondents also declare use of other, remote communication means or exchanging SRS documents. The investigation of requirements documentation techniques revealed differences between the techniques used while describing requirements for developers and those used to elicit requirements from stakeholders and to comprehend them.