Browsing by Author "Horkoff, Jennifer"

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    Challenges of Aligning Requirements Engineering and System Testing in Large-Scale Agile: A Multiple Case Study
    (IEEE, 2017) Gomes de Oliveira Neto, Francisco; Horkoff, Jennifer; Knauss, Eric; Kasauli, Rashidah; Liebel, Grischa
    As agile methods become more pervasive, agile practices are applied to more large-scale systems with a scope that goes beyond pure software. The expansion of agile in these contexts provides benefits, but creates new challenges. Widespread use of agile has changed the way we must think about practices both in Requirements Engineering (RE) and in System Testing (ST). Our experience shows that many challenges in the application of large-scale agile development relate to either RE or ST, and in particular to the alignment between these areas. In this paper we present large-scale agile-related challenges from a multiple case study which relate to REST alignment. We map our challenges to an existing framework for REST alignment, and make an initial attempt to suggest agile RE practices from the literature which may alleviate these challenges. Our results show that the interviewed companies need to first adopt more agile RE practices to enhance REST alignment and then leverage agile testing. Future work will look more towards evaluating these best practices.
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    Managing Traceability Information Models: Not such a simple task after all?
    (IEEE Software, 2020) Maro, Salome; Steghofer, Jan-Philipp; Knauss, Eric; Horkoff, Jennifer; Kasauli, Rashidah; Wohlrab, Rebekka; Lysemose Korsgaard, Jesper; Wartenberg, Florian; Jørgen Strøm, Niels; Alexandersson, Ruben
    Practitioners are poorly supported by the scientific literature when managing traceability information models (TIMs), which capture the structure and semantics of trace links. In practice, companies manage their TIMs in very different ways, even in cases where companies share many similarities. We present our findings from an in-depth focus group about TIM management with three different systems engineering companies. We find that the concrete needs of the companies as well as challenges such as scale and workflow integration are not considered by existing scientific work. We thus issue a call-to-arms for the requirements engineering and software and systems traceability communities, the two main communities for traceability research, to refocus their work on these practical problems.
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    Quality Requirements in Agile as a Knowledge Management Problem: More than Just-in-Time
    (IEEE, 2017) Knauss, Eric; Liebel, Grischa; Schneider, Kurt; Horkoff, Jennifer; Kasauli, Rashidah
    Just-in-time (JIT) approaches have been suggested for managing non-functional requirements in agile projects. However, many non-functional requirements cannot be raised and met on the spot. In this position paper, we argue that effective JIT engineering of quality requirements depends on a solid foundation of long-term knowledge about all relevant quality requirements. We present two examples from projects related to safety and security and show that not all aspects of these quality requirements can be invented and changed just in time. Further, managing, for example, operationalization of quality requirements just in time depends on sufficient understanding of (i) customer value and (ii) the system under construction that must be shared by the engineering team. If a Learning Software Organization (LSO) intends to increase agility and speed up system development, it needs a holistic concept for managing this knowledge. We propose that a knowledgemanagement framework can facilitate JIT-RE by structuring, representing, and allowing updates of long-term knowledge about quality requirements. Such a knowledge-management framework should allow to map user value to system requirements and have important properties to allow JIT RE and sustainable evolution.
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    Requirements engineering challenges and practices in large-scale agile system development
    (The Journal of Systems & Software, 2020) Kasauli, Rashidah; Knauss, Eric; Horkoff, Jennifer; Liebel, Grischa; Gomes de Oliveira Neto, Francisco
    Agile methods have become mainstream even in large-scale systems engineering companies that need to accommodate different development cycles of hardware and software. For such companies, requirements engineering is an essential activity that involves upfront and detailed analysis which can be at odds with agile development methods. Objective: This paper presents a multiple case study with seven large-scale systems companies, reporting their challenges, together with best practices from industry. We also analyse literature about two popular large-scale agile frameworks, SAFeR and LeSS, to derive potential solutions for the challenges. Method: Our results are based on 20 qualitative interviews, five focus groups, and eight cross-company workshops which we used to both collect and validate our results. Results: We found 24 challenges which we grouped in six themes, then mapped to solutions from SAFeR , LeSS, and our companies, when available. Conclusion: In this way, we contribute a comprehensive overview of RE challenges in relation to large-scale agile system development, evaluate the degree to which they have been addressed, and outline research gaps. We expect these results to be useful for practitioners who are responsible for designing processes, methods, or tools for large scale agile development as well as guidance for researchers