Requirements engineering for large scale agile systems development

Paper in proceeding, 2017

Agile practices such as continuous integration and delivery promise shorter time to market and improved quality. For this reason, such practices have been adopted in many software companies. In the context of systems development, additional constraints apply, e.g., as a result of scale or parallel development of hardware and software. Traditionally, stage-gate processes with a focus on up-front requirements analysis are common in large-scale systems engineering. However, long upfront analysis is considered anti agile and there is some friction between RE (which is often considered as a waterfall activity or phase) and agile practices. This paper describes a research agenda that plans to address this friction. The work proposes a series of empirical studies to discover the information needs and related knowledge, pertinent to product development. We expect to make a contribution by establishing guidelines and frameworks that can be used to make requirements engineering a foundation for agile systems development.