Foreword of the Thematic Track: Quality in Agile Methods

Abstract

GILE methodologies have gained increasing popularity in industry due to their ability to cope with unstable requirements throughout the development life cycle, improving communication between developers and customers, and delivering products in shorter time frames, when compared to traditional development methods. These iterative, incremental and adaptive methods, relying on a set of best practices that are considered to increase quality, completely redefine quality assurance work, from formal roles to day-today activities. The developers, following a set of best practices, such as planning game or sprint planning, test driven development (TDD), refactoring, pair programming, continuous integrations, customer collaboration, etc., create value and assure quality through all the development phases, from requirements to the final release. The Quality in ICT Requirements Engineering Thematic Track 2014 has at its final program papers, which consider the topics: requirements elicitation, quality models, requirements specification and formalization, and requirements specification tools. The program includes 2 accepted full papers and two works in progress.