Agile and Traditional Requirements Engineering: A Survey

In the past few years, there has been an increasing awareness of the important role of requirements engineering (RE) in a project’s success, in both research and industry. Developing consistent requirements specifications that meet the customers’ needs, in traditional development, is likely to be infeasible. For one reason, customers do not usually have a clear picture of what they really want. Secondly, the business domain could be changing quickly, especially if it heavily depends on technologies. Agile software development (ASD), on the other hand, supports iterative and incremental development and emphasises customers’ involvement in the development process. We argue that adopting ASD in RE overcomes the limitations of the traditional development. ASD, however, is no silver bullet and its adoption comes at a price. This paper helps the reader to: (1) get a quick yet a comprehensive grasp of RE in traditional and ASD; (2) understand the synergies/commonalities between the two approaches in handling RE; (3) recognise the associated challenges of adopting ASD; and (4) identify the current prominent agile RE research areas.