Quality requirements in large-scale distributed agile projects - A systematic literature review

Context and Motivation: Agile development methods have become increasingly popular in the last years. However, these methods hardly pay attention to quality requirements (QRs), which could undermine the profits of fast delivery by introducing high rework efforts later on. This risk is high especially in agile large-scale distributed settings.

Question/problem: Although several publications reported on the insufficient attention to quality requirements in agile methods, still little is known about agile requirements engineering practices and their impact on quality requirements in large-scale distributed settings. However, companies increasingly use agile methods in those settings, where the negative impact of ignoring quality requirements is large. Hence, the goal of this study is to identify the challenges in the engineering of quality requirements in large-scale distributed agile projects that have been researched so far, the agile practices that have contributed to the emergence of these challenges, and the proposed solutions.

Principle ideas/results: Following an evidence-based research method, we examined 60 papers on quality requirements in agile. We found that, while there are multiple proposals to engineer quality requirements in agile, none of those has been tried out in real-life settings. Evaluating scalability of these proposals, therefore, is a priority for future research.

Contribution: This paper identified 12 challenges in agile projects that harm the quality requirements. Besides, we identified and evaluated 13 proposals for dealing with quality requirements in agile projects, along with implications for practice and research.