A Proposal for Enhancing Agile Requirements Engineering with Prototyping and Enriched User Stories

Abstract

Agile software development is the most developed and widely used family of software development processes. Agile Requirement Engineering (ARE) faces many challenges, such as managing with very little documentation and specifications, ensuring that the development team understands the requirements, and understanding all client needs. In agile methodologies, user stories are the primary means for capturing requirements. But most of the time, user stories are not enough to describe the requirements to the development team to the required level of details. Moreover, sometimes, the client does not have a clear vision of the system features from the beginning. S/he discovers them during or even after delivery, leading to an increase in the amount of rework. Hence, some researchers have suggested solutions to these challenges by using prototypes to support the user stories in explaining the requirements. Others suggested using enriched user stories to get more details about how to implement the requirements. In this paper, we discuss the challenges facing ARE, the role that each of prototyping and enriched user stories can play in improving ARE, and the limitations of each one if used alone. We propose a roadmap to improve ARE by a hybrid process that merges prototyping and enriched user stories along with extra validation steps.