Agile Requirements Engineering for a Social Insurance for Occupational Risks Organization: A Case Study

The objective of this paper is to report on the challenges and experiences gained during a three years multidisciplinary software development project in the insurance domain, focusing on the employed requirements process. Although, there has been consensus on an agile development process among the project partners, this approach stands in some contrast to the traditional (standardized or regulated) development processes commonly employed in the insurance domain, or general, in the public sector. The lessons learned of applying an agile requirements process under the conditions of traditional processes at the customer's site; geographically distributed offices of the customer and development team; diverse interests of involved customers' departments, administrative and operational staff; limited availability of field workers etc. are provided as recommendations for other research and development institutions. Thereby, the viewpoint of each project partner, including the customer's perspective, is described

1 Introduction

IT systems development in the public sector can commonly be characterized as highly-regulated [7] and based on standardized lifecycle process models. The usage of the V-Model [6], the development standard for IT systems of the Federal Republic of Germany, is quite common for IT systems development in the public sector in Germany, and is also used in an adapted version by the public administration in Austria [3]. However, recent advances in software development suggest to use more agile approaches [1], [4], than is the case with the usage of heavy-weight process models as mentioned above.