Managing requirements volatility while “Scrumming” within the V-Model

Changing requirements are a characteristic of all projects today, and the subject of requirements volatility has received attention in both research and industry. The inherent inflexibility of traditional, plan-driven development methods, such as the V-model, in adapting to changes in requirements at various phases of the project has given rise to several agile approaches. In practice, however, globally distributed projects typically combine traditional as well as agile approaches for process rigor and adaptability. In this paper, we discuss the issue of how to manage the causes and mitigate the undesirable effects of requirements volatility in this kind of project set-up. While there is a lot of work on the technical facet of requirements volatility (for example, the development of metrics for its measurement and impact on the existing product modules), its effects on the people involved in the project needs to be given equal weightage. We describe how the technical (project-specific) and non-technical (people-specific) aspects of requirements change were carried through in five globally distributed software-intensive projects that combined the V-model and agile approaches. We discuss how the effects of requirements volatility were smoothed out in the Scrumming-within-the-V-Model paradigm. We then suggest best practices gleaned from these experiences, and throw open some real-world issues that can be taken back to research for further investigation.