Lightweight requirements engineering in agile web development projects

Abstract

Web applications have become more commonplace, but it is still common for development projects to fail to meet their intended goals either in terms of budget, time-to-market or quality. Although increasingly popular in the recent years, the introduction of agile software development methodologies does not seem to make a significant difference as far as project success is concerned.

I present that the problems are often due to failures or shortcomings in the discipline of Requirements Engineering (RE), a set of practices present in all software projects regardless of the development model being used. This thesis attempts to gather data and present a set of concepts and ideas which, introduced in an agile web development project, help to discover and maintain requirements critical for the success of the project. Vixtory, a prototype of a web-based tool for lightweight requirements documentation, is also presented and evaluated.

Asiasanat:Web Application Development, Agile Software Development, Re- quirements Engineering, Requirements Documentation, Lightweightness, Agile Tool Support