Implicit thinking knowledge injection framework for software requirements documentation in agile methodology

Abstract

Software engineering is knowledge-intensive work, and how to manage software engineering knowledge has received much attention. Agile is a common software development methodology among software developers. Requirements documentation (RD) is a challenging task for agile software developers. The existing agile RD does not incorporate the implicit thinking knowledge with the values it intends to achieve in the software project. Moreover, there is no clear framework that incorporates the implicit thinking knowledge of software developers. Therefore, this study developed a framework for Injecting the Implicit Thinking Knowledge in Agile Requirements Documentation (IITKARD). In doing so, a systematic literature review was conducted to identify the challenges of agile requirements engineering from 28 primary studies. A survey administered to 25 software engineering experts was conducted to ascertain the identified challenges of agile requirements engineering. Responses from the experts highlighted that implicit thinking knowledge in agile requirements documentation as one of the challenges. An evaluation was conducted to validate and verify the proposed IITKARD framework using an experiment based on focus group of 10 experts. The feedback from the experts indicated that the injecting of the implicit thinking knowledge in agile RD is important. The experiment with the experts in agile software engineering was carried out to validate and verify the IITKARD and its prototype tool by using two measurement aspects, which were efficiency and usability. The results obtained from the experiment showed that IITKARD was able to assist the experts to inject the implicit knowledge in agile RD measured in efficiency and usability. In addition, the results showed that the IITKARD framework achieved the highest level of experts’ satisfaction. In conclusion, this research contributes to developing the IITKARD, which assists the software developers in injecting their implicit thinking knowledge in agile requirements documentation.