Review A systematic literature review on agile requirements engineering practices and challenges Irum Inayat a,⇑ , Siti Salwah Salim a , Sabrina Marczak b , Maya Daneva c , Shahaboddin Shamshirband d,e a Department of Software Engineering, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya (UM), 50603, Malaysia b School of Computer Science, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul (PUCRS) University, Rio de Janerio, Brazil c Information Science Research Group, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands d Department of Information Systems, Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology, University of Malaya (UM), 50603, Malaysia e Department of Computer Science, Chalous Branch, Islamic Azad University (IAU), 46615-397 Chalous, Mazandaran, Iran article info Article history: Available online xxxx Keywords: Agile software development methods Agile requirements engineering Collaboration Traditional requirements engineering Systematic review abstract Unlike traditional software development methods, agile methods are marked by extensive collaboration, i.e. face-to-face communication. Although claimed to be beneficial, the software development community as a whole is still unfamiliar with the role of the requirements engineering practices in agile methods. The term ‘‘agile requirements engineering’’ is used to define the ‘‘agile way’’ of planning, executing and reason- ing about requirements engineering activities. Moreover, not much is known about the challenges posed by collaboration-oriented agile way of dealing with requirements engineering activities. Our goal is to map the evidence available about requirements engineering practices adopted and challenges faced by agile teams in order to understand how traditional requirements engineering issues are resolved using agile requirements engineering. We conducted a systematic review of literature published between 2002 and June 2013 and identified 21 papers, that discuss agile requirements engineering. We formulated and applied specific inclusion and exclusion criteria in two distinct rounds to determine the most relevant studies for our research goal. The review identified 17 practices of agile requirements engineering, five challenges traceable to traditional requirements engineering that were overcome by agile requirements engineering, and eight challenges posed by the practice of agile requirements engineering. However, our findings suggest that agile requirements engineering as a research context needs additional attention and more empirical results are required to better understand the impact of agile requirements engineering practices e.g. dealing with non-functional requirements and self-organising teams. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Contents 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................... 00 2. Related work.......................................................................................................... 00 3. Research method ...................................................................................................... 00 3.1. Planning the review .............................................................................................. 00 3.1.1. Review objectives and research questions ..................................................................... 00 3.1.2. Search strategy ........................................................................................... 00 3.1.3. Search criteria ............................................................................................ 00 3.1.4. Inclusion and exclusion criteria .............................................................................. 00 3.2. Conducting the review ............................................................................................ 00 3.2.1. Study search and selection.................................................................................. 00 3.2.2. Data extraction and synthesis ............................................................................... 00 3.2.3. Methodological quality assessment ........................................................................... 00 4. Findings of our review .................................................................................................. 00 4.1. Overview of studies............................................................................................... 00 4.2. (RQ1) What are the adopted practices of agile RE according to published empirical studies? ................................... 00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.10.046 0747-5632/Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: irum@siswa.um.edu.my (I. Inayat). Computers in Human Behavior xxx (2014) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Computers in Human Behavior journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comphumbeh Please cite this article in press as: Inayat, I., et al. A systematic literature review on agile requirements engineering practices and challenges. Computers in Human Behavior (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2014.10.046