Agile quality requirements engineering challenges: first results from a case study

Agile software development methods have become increasingly popular in the last years. Despite their popularity, they have been criticized for focusing on delivering functional requirements and neglecting the quality requirements. Several studies have reported this shortcoming. However, there is little known about the challenges organizations currently face when dealing with quality requirements. Based on a qualitative exploratory case study, this research investigated real life large-scale distributed Agile projects to understand the challenges Agile teams face regarding quality requirements. Eighteen semi-structured open-ended in-depth interviews were conducted with Agile practitioners representing six different organizations in the Netherlands. Based on the analysis of the collected data, we have identified nine challenges Agile practitioners face when engineering quality requirements in large-scale distributed Agile projects that could harm the implementation of the quality requirements and result in neglecting them.