Requirements engineering challenges and practices in large-scale agile system development

TLDR

Agile methods are now mainstream in large‑scale systems engineering firms, yet requirements engineering demands upfront, detailed analysis that can conflict with agile practices. This study aims to deliver a comprehensive overview of RE challenges in large‑scale agile development, assess how they are addressed, and highlight research gaps. The authors performed a multiple case study of seven large‑scale companies, analyzed SAFe and LeSS literature, and gathered data through 20 interviews, five focus groups, and eight workshops to identify and validate challenges and solutions. They uncovered 24 challenges grouped into six themes and mapped them to solutions from SAFe, LeSS, and industry practices, providing actionable guidance for practitioners and researchers.

Abstract

Agile methods have become mainstream even in large-scale systems engineering companies that need to accommodate different development cycles of hardware and software. For such companies, requirements engineering is an essential activity that involves upfront and detailed analysis which can be at odds with agile development methods. This paper presents a multiple case study with seven large-scale systems companies, reporting their challenges, together with best practices from industry. We also analyze literature about two popular large-scale agile frameworks, SAFe® and LeSS, to derive potential solutions for the challenges. Our results are based on 20 qualitative interviews, five focus groups, and eight cross-company workshops which we used to both collect and validate our results. We found 24 challenges which we grouped in six themes, then mapped to solutions from SAFe®, LeSS, and our companies, when available. In this way, we contribute a comprehensive overview of RE challenges in relation to large-scale agile system development, evaluate the degree to which they have been addressed, and outline research gaps. We expect these results to be useful for practitioners who are responsible for designing processes, methods, or tools for large scale agile development as well as guidance for researchers.