Data-Driven Requirements Engineering in Agile Software Development - An Approach for Eliciting Requirements from Digital Sources in Organizations using Scrum Methodology

Sammanfattning: Nowadays, the business world is characterized by complexity since market and customer requirements are changing rapidly. Based on this assumption, providers are facing the challenge of delivering software products in shorter terms while these products remain innovative. Agile software development has a huge impact on how software is developed worldwide and promises business value in short iterations. At the same time, requirements are the base of all software products, and consequently, Requirements Engineering (RE) plays one of the most important roles in system development. Traditional techniques referring to intended data do not cover the constantly increasing demands of RE and unintended data from digital sources has amplified the need for Data-Driven Requirements Engineering (DDRE). This study contributes to Computer and System Science by providing a process to combine DDRE and traditional RE approaches in Agile software development methodologies. In this study, the researcher is trying to provide a concrete solution to the lack of an effective process to address data-driven requirements in a Scrum environment organized by regular Sprints and the purpose of it is to suggest a new method for requirements elicitation based on digital data and combine them with traditional stakeholder-driven RE in a Scrum agile environment. The method intends to assist Agile professionals to elicit requirements from digital sources in combination with intended data derived from the stakeholders without impacting the main Agile practices. The approach to conduct this study is Design Science Research (DSR) and contains five steps: Explicate Problem, Define Requirements, Design and develop Artefact, Demonstrate Artefact, and Evaluate Artefact. Literature review has been conducted to explicate the research problem and define the requirements of the artefact. Then, a process and a collaboration board have been created based on the requirements to bring DDRE and traditional RE into the Scrum environment. The researcher performed a demonstration of two illustrative cases of the usage of the proposed artefact to three Scrum professionals and three semi-structured interviews were conducted to evaluate the artefact. After the evaluation, the researcher refined and presented the final artefact that will help the public and private organizations to reduce the costs and time plan on eliciting requirements, and to increase the customers’ satisfaction. The artefact has not been applied in a real Agile environment, but Requirement Engineers and Agile team members can build on the proposed method and bring the elicitation approach of DDRE closer to the software development process.