About REMMA

Purpose

The aim of Requirements Engineering Maturity Model for Agile software development (REMMA) is to enable assessment and improvement of requirements related practices in agile organizations and projects. REMMA consists of two main components: model and assessment method.

The assessment method enables to assess usage of practices in an organization, isolated project, or to analyze differences between a desirable standard of practiced in an organization and a status/state of practices in the chosen project.

Model

The foundation of the model is a set of Agile practices that are related to Requirements Engineering. Those practices serve later as a base of the assessment process.

The practices included into the proposed model are categorized into areas. The areas do not affect the assessment process directly, but provide additional information to help interpreting the results. The following groups of practices were proposed:

• PA1: Customer Involvement
• PA3: Knowledge sharing
• PA4: Acceptance Testing
• PA2: Product Vision
• PA5: Requirements Elicitation, Analysis and Documentation
• PA6: Planning

The areas bring together practices in the total number of 32. Some of the practices are directly related to RE, other have significant impact on the RE process. Each practice needs to be evaluated in respect to how widely it is used. The following, common assessment scale was proposed:

• De facto standard: a practice is commonly agreed in organization / project and nearly always used.
• Normal use: a practice is commonly agreed in organization / project and is frequently used.
• Discretionary use: a practice is not commonly agreed (it is used only by a certain team members as their own initiative) or it is used in less than half of cases.
• Never used: a practice is never used in organization / project.

Each practice is assigned to one of three importance classes:

• Critical: a practice seems crucial in almost any agile project.
• Important: a practice should be used in most of agile projects.
• Additional: an auxiliary practice that is recommended to be used.

Assessment Method

The REMMA model can be used to reveal strengths and weaknesses of Requirements Engineering process in agile software development and can help to discover the areas for improvement

The assessment can be performed at three levels:

• Basic Assessment - practices are assessed independently.
• Influence Assessment - it extends Basic Assessment by including the information about internal relationships between practices. It shows whether there is a synergy between the practices.
• Contextual Assessment - it adjusts Influence Assessment by considering characteristics of the environment in which the projects are developed and which significantly impacts requirements engineering process.