A Supporting Tool for Requirements Prioritization Process in Agile Software Development

Software maintenance is one of the most debated phases in software development process for so many years. Having reputed as the most expensive phase of software development life cycle (SDLC), it utilizes the maximum share of the overall project costs as well as time. Agile software development provides opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout the development lifecycle. However, it does not ideally map with the existing software maintenance process. One of the highlighted issues is the difficulty for searching of information as well as lack of knowledge to solve the maintenance problems within certain time frame. Thus, the main objective of this study is to improve the governance of software maintenance process in an Agile development team. In doing so, a tool named Axita is developed to assist the software maintenance team for storing of information in central data repository and managing projects in more efficient and timely manner. Based on the literature review as well as mapping between the agile software development and the existing ISO software maintenance process, we also proposed six best practices to better govern the software maintenance process in an Agile development team, to overcome the difficulty of information finding and reduce the time spent to solve the maintenance issues. We believe that our study and findings complement the efforts that have been put forth in improving the way we manage software maintenance thus enhance the efficiency of the software development process. Â

User story management is a critical aspect of agile software development, as it involves understanding and prioritizing the needs of stakeholders, and translating them into actionable tasks for development teams. Furthermore, the identification of new activities within products is crucial for enhancing software quality assurance, and user story management is a crucial component of agile software development and software testing. Reusing manually written test steps would be a waste of time and effort for the testers because requirements in agile software development are continually changing and eventually becoming out-dated. Therefore, developers need to implement the necessary functions and write test steps for user stories to determine the desired behaviour or desired result of the program. In an agile world, the user story is the link between the customer and the development team, as well as the main pillar on which the development team relies to understand the product requirements. Therefore, developers need to implement the necessary functions and write test steps for user stories to determine the desired behaviour or desired result of the program. Since agile testing can detect defects early in the software life cycle and deliver a high-quality product, we propose our approach to generating test cases using natural language processing to analyse the user story. Therefore, Neural Language Processing (NLP) techniques help the development team to obtain clear data and achieve customer satisfaction.

In the past decade, there have been a number of notable changes in industrial software engineering, including the movement towards agility. The Agile Manifesto characterizes the term “agile”, and lists a set of principles that form a basis for agile methodologies [1], such as Extreme Programming (XP), OpenUP, and Scrum. There is creation, communication, and consumption of knowledge during (agile) software development [2]. For the success of an agile project, it is crucial that such knowledge be managed effectively. In doing so, an appropriate selection and use of certain tools and technologies can be helpful. In the past few years, there has been a proliferation of Social Web Applications, such as Wiki [3]. Indeed, a number of noteworthy uses of Wiki in software engineering have been reported [4]. However, these studies are largely independent of any software development methodology, and are centered mostly on collaboration. The primary reasons for selecting Wiki for agile software development include the following: (1) the deployment of agile methodologies, especially XP and Scrum, with teams that are increasingly geographically-dispersed, (2) the involvement in sustainable software development by organizations with basic infrastructure and modest budgets for resources, and (3) the need of inexpensive, mature, and widely-available tools for supporting iterative development, by almost anybody, at anytime, anywhere, using almost any device. The purpose of this research is to provide a framework for integrating Wiki for the purpose of facilitating the dynamics of knowledge during agile software development.

Despite of many criticisms, agile software development (Beck et al., Manifesto for Agile Software Development, http://agilemanifesto.org, [1]) philosophy has been proved to be quite successful to increase the project success rate up to a significant extent. The primary reasons behind the criticism of agile are the strong violation of the traditional disciplined software engineering theories, principles and practices. The goal of this research paper is to establish the fact that agility may also be achieved by following traditional process models especially with BRIDGE (Mandal, 2009 IEEE International Advance Computing Conference (IACC 2009) Patiala, India, [2]) process model. Hence, the aim of this paper is to integrate the agile and traditional disciplined software development process models and establish the compatibility between both the approaches. At the beginning, we have explored the objectives and principles of agile software development. Next, we briefly discussed the BRIDGE process model and further justified that--following BRIDGE process model, the philosophy of agile may also be achieved and conclude that BRIDGE model has both the capability of traditional software development process model as well as of the agile process.

Contemporary software is increasingly developed using an agile development approach, yet the supplier is generally selected as a result of a waterfall-style competitive tendering and contracting process. The procurement activity may be incompatible with an agile elaboration of requirements and development of functionality, and lead to sub-optimal outcomes. This paper examines the interaction of the procurement and software development lifecycles, explores potential causes of project or system failures and suggests some improvements based on a successful 10 year project between ADI Limited and the Australian Department of Defence.

Software development depends on various factors and organizational culture is one of them. Recently agile software development, with its emphasis on agility, has received much attention. Research so far has focused on the constructs that define agility and also identified the reasons that limit teams from exhibiting all the constructs of agile software development. This lead to re-defining agility by using economic, quality, simplicity and the relationship with the environment it operates on. One of the factors that contribute to relationship with environment is organizational culture. Though relationship of organizational culture and software methods is not new, analyzing the relationship further in the new defined definition of agility can provide deep insights into software development. In this paper a qualitative research method of multiple case-studies consisting of 3 releases of one product development team was selected. Data was collected using participant-observation method. Research findings have identified some useful insights that could provide researchers and practitioners to develop software development life-cycle that incorporates existing agile methods and uses diverse set of methods to resolve issues including organizational issues. Thereby the new software development life-cycle would not distinguish between agile and plan-driven development methods and could shape itself in the changing context.

Software testing process is an important factor affecting the quality of software testing, which plays an important role in the entire software development life cycle. In order to achieve a precise result of testing, different software testing process model will be chosen in different software development process for testing. Traditional testing process model will be chosen in traditional software development, and agile testing process model will be chosen in agile software development. However, there is no kind of testing process model proposed for a special software development which is a combination of traditional software development and agile software development. This article will propose a hybrid software testing process model aiming at a combination of traditional software development model and agile software development model. In the following sections, traditional testing process model and agile testing process model will be introduced respectively in the first place. Most attentions will be paid to the introduction and analysis of the hybrid software testing process model through one case. Furthermore, we will discuss the relationship of the data tracing involved in the testing process model.

Due to increasing interest in distributed agile software development, there is a need to systematically review the literature on challenges encountered in the agile software development environment.Using the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach, 32 relevant publications, dated between 2013 and 2018 were selected from four electronic databases.Data from these publications were extracted to identify the key challenges across the system development life cycle (SDLC) phases, which essentially are short phases in each agile-based iteration.5 types of key challenges were identified as impacting the SDLC phases; these challenges are Communication, Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration and Control.In the context of the SLDC phases, the Communication challenge was discussed the most often (79 times, 33%).The least discussed challenges were Cooperation and Collaboration (26 times, 11% each).The 5 challenges occur because of distances which occur in distributed environment.This SLR identified 4 types of distances which contribute to the occurrence of these key challenges -physical, temporal, social-cultural and knowledge/experience.Of the 32 publications, only 4 included research which proposed new solutions to address challenges in agile distributed software development.The authors of this article believe that the findings in this SLR are a resource for future research work to deepen the understanding of and to develop additional solutions to address the challenges in distributed agile software development.

<p>Agile software development offers a deceptively simple means to organise complex multi-participant software development while achieving fast delivery of quality software, meeting customer requirements, and coping effectively with project change. There is little understanding, however, of how agile software development projects achieve effective coordination, a critical factor in successful software projects. Agile software development provides a unique set of practices for organising the work of software projects, and these practices seem to achieve effective project coordination. Therefore, this thesis takes a coordination perspective to explore how agile software projects work, and why they are effective. The outcome of this research is a theory of coordination in co-located agile software development projects. To build a coordination theory, evidence was drawn from a multi-case study following the positivist tradition in information systems. Three cases of agile software development contributed to the theory, along with one additional non-agile project that contributed contrasting evidence. The findings show that agile software development practices form a coordination strategy addressing three broad categories of dependency: knowledge dependencies, task dependencies, and resource dependencies. Most coordination is for managing requirement, expertise, historical, and task allocation dependencies; all forms of knowledge dependency. Also present are task dependencies, which include activity or business process dependencies, and resource dependencies, which include technical or entity dependencies. The theory of coordination explains that an agile coordination strategy consists of coordination mechanisms for synchronising the project team, for structuring their relations, and for boundary spanning. A coordination strategy contributes to coordination effectiveness, which has explicit and implicit components. The primary contribution of this theory is an explanation of how agile software development practices act together to achieve effective project coordination. The coordination strategy concept can be used to select practices from agile methods to ensure software projects achieve effective coordination. In addition, once operationalised in future work, the well-grounded theoretical concepts developed in this research will provide valuable tools for measuring the coordination effectiveness of agile method adoption and adaptation.</p>

<p>Agile software development offers a deceptively simple means to organise complex multi-participant software development while achieving fast delivery of quality software, meeting customer requirements, and coping effectively with project change. There is little understanding, however, of how agile software development projects achieve effective coordination, a critical factor in successful software projects. Agile software development provides a unique set of practices for organising the work of software projects, and these practices seem to achieve effective project coordination. Therefore, this thesis takes a coordination perspective to explore how agile software projects work, and why they are effective. The outcome of this research is a theory of coordination in co-located agile software development projects. To build a coordination theory, evidence was drawn from a multi-case study following the positivist tradition in information systems. Three cases of agile software development contributed to the theory, along with one additional non-agile project that contributed contrasting evidence. The findings show that agile software development practices form a coordination strategy addressing three broad categories of dependency: knowledge dependencies, task dependencies, and resource dependencies. Most coordination is for managing requirement, expertise, historical, and task allocation dependencies; all forms of knowledge dependency. Also present are task dependencies, which include activity or business process dependencies, and resource dependencies, which include technical or entity dependencies. The theory of coordination explains that an agile coordination strategy consists of coordination mechanisms for synchronising the project team, for structuring their relations, and for boundary spanning. A coordination strategy contributes to coordination effectiveness, which has explicit and implicit components. The primary contribution of this theory is an explanation of how agile software development practices act together to achieve effective project coordination. The coordination strategy concept can be used to select practices from agile methods to ensure software projects achieve effective coordination. In addition, once operationalised in future work, the well-grounded theoretical concepts developed in this research will provide valuable tools for measuring the coordination effectiveness of agile method adoption and adaptation.</p>

PurposeAs the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) impacts the world, software practitioners are collaboratively working remotely from home. The pandemic has disrupted software practitioners’ productivity forcing changes to agile methodology adopted by software practitioners in software organizations. Therefore, this study aims to provide implication on the issues and recommendations for improving software practitioners’ productivity and also examine the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on agile software development.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adopts a narrative literature review to provide early assessment based on secondary data from the literature and available document reports from studies published from 2019 to 2022 to explore software practitioners’ productivity and agile software development during the working from home directive amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. A total of 60 sources which met the inclusion criteria were used to provide preliminary evidence grounded on secondary data from the literature. Descriptive analysis was used to provide qualitative findings from the literature.FindingsFindings from this study present the significance of working from home directive on agile software development and software practitioners’ productivity. More importantly, findings from the secondary data shed light on software practitioners’ productivity adopting agile software development amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, the findings present virtual collaborative platforms used by software practitioners, technical and social barriers of agile software development during the pandemic and recommendations for remote agile software development.Originality/valueThis study explores the significance of working from home directive on software practitioners’ productivity during COVID-19 pandemic and further investigates how are software practitioners’ productivity adopting agile software development practices amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Besides, this study discusses the challenges software practitioners currently face and offers some strategies to bridge the gaps in agile software development to help software practitioners, system developers, software managers and software organizations adapt to the changes caused by the pandemic.

In any software systems, the requirements prioritization considered as pivotal task. This paper aims to explain and discuss the works done on requirements prioritization based Machine learning along with the dependency-aware requirements prioritization. Machine learning has become of attention to scientists, researchers, and users because of the existence of vast data and deep learning algorithms that can analyze massive sets of data. The basic algorithms are used for dependency learning calculation, resolve the stakeholder’s conflicts, classify requirements, and scalability improvement. This paper will present a brief background and comprehensive presentation of a number of machine learning techniques for requirements prioritization and those concerning the requirement dependency in its simple, complex, and Hybrid form. There are a number of papers, articles, and research papers that deal with requirements prioritization, few of them handling the dependency. This paper will present a brief background for several requirements prioritization based on machine learning. then make a comparison and discussion of a number of selected techniques in terms of algorithm type, issues addressed, and evaluated data level. method that handling the dependency regarding of strengths and weakness

Background: Requirement prioritization plays key role in software development process. It is essential to prioritize the requirements for making the correct decision for either a single or multiple release of a product. In this paper we performed a systematic analysis on some of the significant factors like importance of requirements, risks, cost and time in context of requirement prioritization. Objective: With benefits these prioritization methods also have some limitations and shortcoming that are brought up in this paper. Stakeholders, managers, developers or their representatives make decisions for prioritization of requirements. Many techniques are analyzed how to manage these prioritizations considering general goals and limitations. Method: For the identification and analyzing of research articles published during 2009-2017, Systematic Literature Review based method is used in this paper. Results: In recent researches 40 different requirement prioritizations techniques has been used. This SLR also shows the major research gaps regarding techniques and tools for software requirements prioritization. Conclusion: This research shows the major prioritization techniques and tools for requirements elicitation. Tools & techniques identified in this study will assist future researchers to expend their views in the context. Moreover, it will help requirement engineers and practitioners to choose requirement prioritization techniques and tools according to their needs.

This paper presents a discussion of educational case studies used in security requirements assessment and requirements prioritization. Related to this, it introduces risk understanding as an added dimension to the requirements prioritization process. It should be self-evident that the final product should incorporate the requirements with the greatest value. Nevertheless, in a time when security is a preeminent concern it should also be clear that risk elements should also be considered. As such, activities to reconcile risk with value are always essential. However, since risk and value considerations are different, and sometimes opposed to each other, this paper presents a new process that will help decision makers reconcile these two factors within a single approach. This new process may also be incorporated into security requirements education and prioritization.

In requirements engineering (RE), different activities are carried on to add up business values to the software products. In value-base software (VBS), financial impacts on business are measured, and this phenomenon makes VBS different than other traditional software applications. In VBS systems, determination of valuable requirements is a crucial task and depends on multiple aspects or factors. Requirement prioritization is a part of RE and is considered as a crucial decision-making activity. Requirements prioritization is a process where requirements are arranged in an order to create a stakeholder priority list. Different requirements prioritization techniques are used by the experts in the industry to partially support the prioritization process for VBS development. Business and technical aspects play a vital role to make prioritization process effective. In existing requirements prioritization techniques, technical aspects are not applied well, and their consideration is partial only. Moreover, the business aspects are ignored which are highly vital for VBS development. There is a need to introduce multi-aspects requirements prioritization technique to support the selection of candidate requirements for VBS development. Hence, this paper focuses on a new requirements prioritization technique for VBS.