Experiences with Supporting the Distributed Responsibility for Requirements through Decision Documentation

In agile development projects typically all developers are responsible for requirements engineering [2]. They both elicit and shape requirements continuously. Developers elicit requirements from the customer. But they also shape requirements in discussions with the customer and within the development team. Thus, decisions are made on how to realize the requirements in the systems’ architecture and implementation. This can lead to new or refined requirements. This decision-making process requires a common language for and understanding of the elicited and shaped requirements. Also, developers need to comprehend and exploit former and current decisions. In order to address this need, several approaches propose structures and management processes for knowledge on decisions and their related requirements. However, experience reports describing such a management of decision knowledge in agile projects are rare. Therefore, we present a practical example for the management of decision knowledge. Moreover, we reflect the example to analyze our approach on decision documentation as described in [1]. In particular, we show that decision documentation was already applied in an agile project, but can be improved in order to support the effective eliciting and shaping of requirements.