Requirements Engineering Challenges for large scale Agile projects

Large scale agile implementation projects have multiple scrum teams working in parallel. Each scrum team works on a specific component of the overall product. Cross-scrum discussions are used to track progress & adjust / update product requirements accordingly. Agile projects have a constant challenge to keep up to date with constantly changing / evolving requirements.

 

Agile requirements engineering covers implicit & explicit requirements, including sharing & coordination of functionality, quality, or value-related knowledge. RE applied to large-scale agile projects, perceived to increase flexibility, planning efficiency & improve communication effectiveness. However, this requires proper co-ordination, requirements traceability, impact analysis cross components for overall success.

Problem areas in agile RE include – use of customer representatives, requirements prioritization, growing technical debt, over-commitment, organizing system-level work, non-functional requirements, minimal documentation, etc. 

Sample research methodology involves:

1. Select case companies for research
2. Sampling & data collection
3. Data verification
4. Data analysis
5. Identify challenges & potential solutions

Few challenges identified by researchers :

1. Build and Maintain Shared Understanding of Customer Value
2. Support Change and Evolution
3. Build and Maintain Shared Understanding about System
4. Representation for Requirements Knowledge
5. Process Aspects - prioritization, completeness & consistency, quality v/s time-to-market
6. Organizational Aspects - V&V based on requirements, driving agile by change, etc.

Researchers recommend solutions by use of popular agile practices - SAFe, LeSS, Sprint bazaar, etc. 

One of the main pain points is the need for a global baseline of requirements, that reasons the overall product; and emphasis for large scale agile projects to focus on end product, and drive component-level design decisions keeping the end product in mind. 

Keeping track of requirements (traceability) - is another pain point called out for large scale agile implementations. Kanban / XP / Scrum focus less on documents, hence it's easy to loose track of requirements in large projects. This calls for organizations to centralize & maintain requirements, reuse them - rather than repeat.

While agile projects improves creativity, innovation, collaboration in scrum teams, it's all the more important to maintain focus quality & innovation. This helps organizations improve upon agile maturity. Type of product requirements can further be standardized by the type of industry / product. 

Managing RE is all the more important for 'safety critical' & 'regulated systems'. RE management needs maturity across large organizations, ranging from light-weight non-critical systems to complex, large scale critical systems in the industry.

In summary, few open challenges for agile RE:

• synchronize product development cross parallel scrum-teams. Requirements are constantly evolving in agile projects. 
• keep focus on end product in focus, give due consideration to requirements management along with product delivery
• maintain centralized requirements as a reference, remove outdated requirements from the product backlog.
• secure such centralized requirements with confidential access, so as to protect product design access to external sub-contracts / competition (security is a trade-off with managing centralized requirements for agile RE). 
• system component designs aren’t centralized. They’re maintained by scrum teams individually.
• emphasis on non-functionals (NFR) captured at an early stage, need for qualitative planning & analysis at an early stage.
• trade-off between quality & time-to-market

References

1. Agile requirements engineering - https://www.javatpoint.com/software-engineering-requirement-engineering
2. Balasubramaniam Ramesh; Lan Cao; Richard Baskerville; Agile Requirements Engineering Practices: An Empirical Study; https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/4420071
3. Rashidah Kasauli; Eric Knauss; Jennifer Horkoff; Grischa Liebel; Francisco Gomes de Oliveira Neto; Requirements engineering challenges and practices in large-scale agile system development https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320026057_Requirements_Engineering_Challenges_in_Large-Scale_Agile_System_Development
4. Eva-Maria Schön; Dominique Winter María José EscalonaJörg Thomaschewski https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/key-challenges-in-agile-requirements-engineering/12222614
5.  Graziela Simone Tonin; Alfredo Goldman; Carolyn Seaman; Diogo Pina - Effects of Technical Debt Awareness: A Classroom Study https://www.springerprofessional.de/en/effects-of-technical-debt-awareness-a-classroom-study/12222620
6. Kati Kuusinen; Peggy Gregory; Helen Sharp; Leonor Barroca; Katie Taylor; Laurence Wood – Knowledge sharing in a Large Agile Organization: A Survey study https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316114015_Knowledge_Sharing_in_a_Large_Agile_Organisation_A_Survey_Study