DEMO and the story-card method : requirements elicitation for agile software development at scale

Abstract

Enterprises of today are faced with rapidly changing technologies and customer needs within unpredictable environments that require a new mindset for creating an agile enterprise. Agile practices gained momentum within software development communities due to their speed-of-delivery and incremental value delivery. Yet, for software development projects at scale, theorists believe that stakeholders first need to have a common understanding of the enterprise operational context, sharing a common big picture as part of requirements elicitation. The design and engineering methodology for organizations (DEMO) encapsulates an organization construction diagram (OCD) that is useful for representing the enterprise operational context, i.e. removing unnecessary clutter of technology implementation detail. Theory indicates that abstract OCD concepts are concise and used in a consistent way. Yet, agile methodologies require models that encourage collaboration, are easy to understand and relate to a concrete world, rather than an abstract world. The main contribution of this article is to present a different means of introducing the OCD to software development stakeholders, relating abstract concepts of the OCD back to a concrete world. Using design science research, this study suggests and evaluates a story-card method that incorporates collaborative and easy-to-use technologies, i.e. sticky notes as story cards. Feedback from 21 research participants indicated that the story-card method indeed facilitated translation of a concrete world into more abstract (and concise) concepts of the OCD, also improving the possibility of adopting the OCD at an enterprise as a means to represent a common understanding of the enterprise operational context.