Research Methodology

Assignment # 1

Submitted by: Lubaba

Rashid

MSCSE-25
Nagy R. and Salwa M., 2016, Requirements Engineering in Scrum Framework,
International Journal of Computer Applications, Vol.149, No.8, pp. 24-29.

This paper aims to identify and explain different techniques of requirement Engineering used in
Scrum (an Agile Framework proposed in 1995). Requirement Engineering (RE) is a systematic,
human centric process of developing and managing the requirements of a system in a disciplined
way and is documentation oriented process. Scrum being an agile framework focuses more on
the working software over comprehensive documentation, making the Requirement Engineering
somehow, a challenging task in agile frameworks and it constitutes a rich topic to be researched.
The paper effectively defines the research topic and its significance as RE being most critical
step of software development, needs to be managed properly in lightweight agile frameworks, in
order to achieve certain RE benefits. It also defines the special terminologies related to RE and
Scrum in a precise way. A short but comprehensive background work is provided which gives
insights about the current situation of RE in scrum by referring the related literature.

In the beginning, the authors have clearly explained both the RE process and the Scrum
framework and how RE activities are related to Scrum. In the literature review, the paper
provides with the available research findings related to RE in agile. There are about seven
research studies which are discussed and their insights are provided, however, these are very
limited and require to be more detailed. This section also discusses how the Re activities are
being carried out currently in Scrum and how these activities differ from those in traditional
development.

In the third section, the paper defines RE and its fundamental activities. It refers RE as a branch
of Software Engineering, however, other studies argue that software needs to work together with
the system to which it is embedded, and therefore, RE should be defined in system level context.
The fundamental RE activities are: Requirement Elicitation which involves finding requirements,
system boundaries and other constraints, Requirement Analysis which involves analyzing the
requirements for inconsistencies, and conflicts and resoling these conflicts through negotiation,
Requirement Documentation which involves documenting requirements so that they can be
communicated to customers and developers, Requirement Validation which involves checking
whether the specified requirements meet the stakeholders’ real needs, Requirement management
which involves activities to approve or disapprove the requirement change requests after
analyzing their impact and implement them if they are approved. These activities are evidently
described in the paper, however, the authors have not provided with the insights of the inherent
problems and challenges that may occur while performing these activities.

The forth section of the paper describes Scrum in detail. Being an agile methodology scrum
prefers individuals over processes, and is light weighted methodology focusing on minimal
documentation. The concept of minimal documentation requires different RE activities to be
managed carefully in agile frameworks. In Scrum requirements are listed in Product backlog and
are prioritized by the Product Owner. A Sprint Backlog is chunked from the product backlog
during iteration. The time required for iteration is termed as Sprint. To involve all the
stakeholders and for communication within team daily meeting called Scrum are carried out by
the Scrum Master. Each sprint ends with delivering a working part of the software and its review.
The authors, in this section, have defined very comprehensively the roles (Product owner, Scrum
master, and Scrum team), Artifacts (Product backlog, Sprint backlog, and Increment) and events
(Sprint, Sprint planning, Daily Scrum, Sprint Review, and Sprint Retrospective).

The paper in its 5th section, discusses the RE techniques employed in Scrum. For Requirement
Elicitation, Scrum employs interviews, prototyping, and user stories. The authors have specified
these techniques but they did not provide an insight about when these techniques should be used
and what relative benefits they offer in comparison to each other. Also the paper does not
provide any information about the issues that may be encountered during this phase, like, lack of
stakeholder availability and his involvement in the elicitation process, etc. For Requirement
analysis, Scrum uses JAD sessions and Prioritization, so that conflicts can be identified and
resolved and requirements can be prioritized in terms of their priorities. The authors here have
explained the techniques of JAD and Prioritization and also the way these are executed, however,
their significance and their potential problems' identification is lacking. For Requirement
Validation in Scrum, authors suggest to employ Review meetings and Testing. Testing is
fundamental to agile frameworks; they iteratively use Acceptance testing and test driven
development etc. These tests have been defined properly in the paper along with their
significance; however, the information about the way they are executed and who will execute
them is missing. Requirement Documentation in agile is something which needs to be explained
clearly. Scrum light weight framework, goes for minimal documentation, it employs use cases
and other computer based tools for modeling and documenting requirements. However, these
modeling and documentations are not detailed as in traditional RE. Requirement management in
Scrum is supported by employing RE in incremental iterations, and by receiving continuous
feedback from the customers. With lesser documentations, there may arise certain issues, like
how a new team member will understand the whole project, how to trace the source of a
requirement when a request to change it, is received and other traceability and maintainability
issues. The authors have not provided any significant information regarding these issues. These
issues require to be identified and addressed in order to get proper benefits of RE in Scrum.

The paper concludes on identifying some RE challenges in Scrum as a whole. Authors argue that
there are only a few RE techniques that can be employed to in Scrum. Also no defined
techniques are there to incorporate and manage the non-functional requirements. Furthermore
Scalability and complexity of the project are also challenging for RE techniques. The authors
therefore suggest the need of further research in this area so that Agile frameworks can be
improved by using effective RE practices.

Conclusion: RE being human centric process itself is a topic which requires extensive research.
Many organizations are now moving from traditional development methods to Agile, and
therefore, research in this area is of great significance. In the paper the authors have effectively
described different RE activities and their execution in Scrum, along with various RE techniques
that can be employed at each step. However, it lacks the identification and solution of different
issues and challenges that may rise during the process, also information about their relative pros
and cons is lacking. As scrum Involves continuous participation from the user side throughout
the development life cycle, gathering and validating the requirements before iteration is easy,
however, the concept of minimal documentation makes the requirement management and
traceability a challenging task. Therefore, the paper can be improved by adding information in
this dimension.