Knowledge Management Initiatives in Agile Software Development

Agile software development (ASD) is a knowledge-intensive and collaborative activity and thus Knowledge Management (KM) principals should be applied to improve the productivity of the whole ASD process from the beginning to the end of the phase. The goal is to map the evidence available on existing researches on KM initiatives in ASD in order to identify the state of the art in the area as well as the future research. Therefore, investigation of various aspects such as purposes, types of knowledge, technologies and research type are essential. The authors conducted a systematic review of literature published between 2010 and December 2017 and identified 12 studies that discuss agile requirements engineering. They formulated and applied specific inclusion and exclusion criteria in two distinct rounds to determine the most relevant studies for their research goal. Reuse of knowledge of the team is the perspective that has received more attention.

Leveraging network-centric strategic goals in capabilities

The vision of network-centric operations is to increase operational capabilities through networked collaboration. NATO and its member nations state this vision in strategic documents at a very high level of abstraction. While suitable for giving an overall feel, current documentation renders the steps toward implementing those visions largely unsupported. We outline a method that is based on agile requirements engineering, for converting high-level strategic visions into capabilities whose forms lend themselves to incremental implementation. We illustrate the use of this method in two cases that deal with both operational capabilities and technical capabilities. We also show how the method enables one to prioritise which capabilities to develop first. We conclude that it is necessary to formulate and implement some form of explicit methodology with which to span the gap between strategic visions and an effective implementation of those visions.

Critical Success Factors and Challenges in Agile Requirements Engineering

Nowadays, the requirements of the software are changing rapidly in order to meet clients’ needs, which increases the complexity of developing software. Thus, Agile requirements engineering has arisen and it focuses on how to deal with the increasing changes in software requirements by gathering requirements iteratively and collaboratively with the clients. Thus, the clients’ satisfaction could be met more easily. On the other side, researchers have tried to improve agile requirements engineering from time to time, however, there are still limitations and challenges faced, which need more attention. Thus, this study is conducted by performing a systematic literature review technique to investigate the challenges, critical success factors, and the topics that need more attention in the agile requirements engineering field. In the beginning, the study obtained 178 articles related to this topic which were published from 2002 until 2019. After a thorough analysis of the articles, the study reviewed the ten (10) challenges and the proposed solutions that mentioned in the previous studies. Besides that, the study found six (6) critical success factors, and highlighted four (4) topics that need more attention from the researchers in future studies in agile requirements engineering.