Handling Requirements Dependencies in Agile Projects: A Focus Group with Agile Software Development Practitioners

Agile practices on requirements dependencies are a relatively unexplored topic in literature. Empirical studies on it are scarce. This research sets out to uncover concepts that practitioners in companies of various sizes across the globe and in various industries, use for dealing with requirements dependencies in their agile software projects. Concepts were revealed through online focus group research, using an adapted forum for discussion, and grounded theory to analyze the responses. Our study resulted in the following findings: (1) requirements dependencies occur in agile projects and are important to these projects' success just as this is known for 'traditional' software projects'; (2) requirements dependencies (i) were considered and treated as part of risk management, (ii) were deemed a responsibility of the individual team members, and (iii) mostly did affect project planning; (3) continuous communication and collaboration - two essential features of any agile method, were found critical to mitigating the risks due to dependencies; (4) a hybrid approach to architecture between agile and plan-driven methods was perceived to yield maximum scalability and help coping with dependencies; (5) 'cross-cutting concerns', a category of dependencies, were not uniformly understood in an agile context and require more research.