An Empirical Study on the Requirements Engineering Practices for Agile Software Development

Collecting, understanding, and managing requirements are critical aspects in all development methods including agile methods as well. Nevertheless, little contemporary data exists for document actual practices of software professionals for software requirements engineering activities in agile environments. To remedy this deficiency and provide useful data to other researchers we conducted a survey study that drew participants from wide range of professions, industries and geographic locations. We filtered the survey responses according to the Software Development Life Cycle, then we analyzed how agile processes (compared to traditional waterfall model) deal with a paradox of requirements engineering. In this paper, we present this exploratory survey and its quantitative results.