Requirements Tracing in Agile Environments

Abstract

Scholars have studied for many years the challenges of integrating requirements traceability in Agile environments. The developed tools, frameworks, and models in the literature take a rather technical perspective on the problem. The scholars focus primarily on mechanisms that provide accurate and relevant information retrieval from the requirements database or analyze various techniques for creating valid links between requirements. Although the technical approach provides solutions to several scoped challenges, the scholars did not take into account the business goals, stakeholders’ needs, and business processes. In practice, the company resources, the development approach, and knowledge workers’ interests play a critical role in requirements traceability. As a result, multiple tradeoffs are required to develop a balanced and stable environment. In particular, the approaches are not in sync with agile development approaches, whereas the first requires documentation, the latter is focused on working software. Therefore, taking a business and management perspective on requirements traceability integration in Agile methodologies could bring new meaningful insights into solving existing challenges.

Management requires to make trade-offs between what is desirable and feasible given limited resources and the need to stay agile. As a result, a framework for making these trade-offs is developed. In addition, a model capturing the main elements needed for traceability is designed, which can be modified/customized by other companies to realize RT given the limitations (or no limitations) brought by resources and business goals/strategy.