Enhancing Requirements Engineering in Agile Methodologies by Agent-Oriented Goal Models: Two Empirical Case Studies

The use of agile methods in software engineering is a standard practice and user stories are established artefacts used for breaking complex system requirements into smaller subsets. However, user stories do not suffice for understanding the big picture of system requirements. While there are methods that try to solve this problem, they lack visual tool support and are too heavy for smaller projects. We have earlier proposed a novel agile agent-oriented modelling (AAOM) method for filling this gap. The AAOM method comprises a visual approach to requirements engineering in agile projects that is based on goal models originating in agent-oriented modelling and connects goals intuitively to user stories. The purpose of the study reported in this article was evaluating the AAOM method for requirements engineering in two real-life case studies. The qualitative evaluation explores the applicability of AAOM for requirements engineering in agile software development processes.