Requirements engineering practice and problems in agile projects: results from an international survey

Requirements engineering (RE) is considerably different in agile development than in traditional processes. Yet, there is little empirical knowledge on the state of the practice and contemporary problems in agile RE. As part of a bigger survey initiative (Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering), we build an empirical basis on such aspects of agile RE. Based on the responses from 92 people representing 92 organizations, we found that agile RE concentrates on free-text documentation of requirements elicited with a variety of techniques. Many manage explicit traces between requirements and code. Furthermore, the continuous improvement of RE is done because of intrinsic motivation. Important experienced problems include unclear requirements and communication flaws. Hence, agile RE is in several aspects not so different from RE in other development processes. We plan to investigate specific techniques, such as acceptance-test-driven development, in a future survey to better capture what is special in agile RE.