Towards Requirements Communication and Documentation Guidelines for Agile Teams

We gained detailed empirical knowledge about role-specific information needs that have to be satisfied in requirements documents in traditional software development processes. Motivated by the widespread use of agile development and existing challenges in industry regarding agile requirements engineering our current research aims at investigating whether agile teams could also benefit from results of our previous research. To support typical agile development characteristics like extensive collaboration and communication, we envision the elaboration of communication and documentation guidelines based on empirical data about information needs. As a first step, we compared the scope and content of RE artifacts produced in agile activities (e.g. user stories) to previously investigated traditional RE artifacts. This analysis shows that artifacts resulting from agile activities cover key requirements information, but the level of detail is often less than in traditional RE artifacts. In order to better understand possible implications, we conducted interviews and a survey with agile team members. Initial results reveal that, for example, less detailed documentation leads to problems like product inconsistencies in agile settings. Moreover, we gained first insights into the relevance of RE-related agile artifacts for activities like architecture design, user interface design and testing.