Workbench for Agile Requirement Engineering

Abstract

Requirements engineering has always been an important topic and has even more been put in focus and highly discussed in the last decades. The popularity of agile programming procedure models - which are renouncing a beforehand phase of requirements engineering -has led to discussions about the status and benefits of requirements engineering. Even though the use of traditional requirements engineering procedure models has become rare, proper requirements engineering has not lost its value. It comes in a new form, adapting to the change in programming procedure methods adding value in the AGILE age. This thesis addresses the evolution of requirements engineering from traditional very firmly structured procedure models to agile and flexible requirement engineering approaches. Thereby strengths and challenges of both views are identified, analysed and used to develop a workbench to help companies with requirements engineering in different kinds of projects, with different customers and different scopes. Literature review and a qualitative content study of a case study are used to identify important criteria and form the basis of the workbench. Three use case descriptions are used to evaluate the functioning of the workbench. The case study method was chosen because the topic revolves around human behaviour and decision making. The findings show that a workbench can very well be used to bridge challenges of both traditional and agile requirements engineering and offers a new perspective on the topic of requirements engineering.