RQ2: Good RE practices applied in RE process using SAFe

The second research question that was answered during this thesis is ‘which good RE practices

can be applied in RE process using Scaled Agile Framework, of the case company?’ The goal

of this research question was to identify and implement the good RE practices that can be applied in RE process of SAFe. The results of the good RE practices helped in overcoming the challenges faced in the case company project, using SAFe.

 Applying modelling techniques: This good RE practice represents information visually by creating models such as, requirements model and domain models. For implementing this practice, the modelling techniques proposed for representing domain and requirements were entity-relationship diagrams and use-case diagrams. Along with documenting requirements (epics, features and stories), modelling improved better understanding of requirements in distributed teams.

The visual representation reduced ambiguity in requirements and made it easy to communicate by breaking the language barriers spoken across. Entity-Relationship diagrams used for modelling the domain information, benefited the members who were new to the team as it helped them to provide good domain knowledge. The tools used to create the models were Microsoft Visio and other online available tools.

 Sharing knowledge through Community of Practice (CoP): Community of Practice enables knowledge sharing by gathering groups of people having common interest in technical or business domain [25]. SAFe uses this concept as a practice to enable practitioners to exchange knowledge and skills with people across entire organization [25]. The groups can be divided into roles such as scrum masters, product owners or business analyst or RTEs. In the empirical study the practice was implemented for the product owners and business analysts to share their skills and experiences to improve the RE process. We followed the eight characteristics of successful CoP proposed by Paasivaara and Lassenius [48]. The eight characteristics were, interesting topic with concrete benefits to participants, passionate leader, proper agenda, decision making authority, open community, supporting tools to create transparency, suitable rhythm, and cross-site participation when needed. Community of Practice helped the members in knowing people across the organizations who faced similar or different kinds of issues and how they solved them. Some product owners discussed about their success factors in their projects which benefited the other product owners facing issues. For example, some techniques were discussed on how to split features to user stories.

 Maintain requirement traceability for dependencies: This good RE practice of SAFe manages and maintains requirement dependencies. In the PI planning meeting, a program board is created which is physical display that provides a picture of feature dependencies across the teams in an Agile Release Train (ART). SAFe believes that, creating a program board enables face-to-face communication with team members on discussing the feature dependencies. But this was recognized as a failure when the teams were globally distributed and cannot physically participate in the same location. It was proposed to digitize the program board so that it could be easily viewed by the globally distributed teams without any loss of information. The cheaper and easy solution proposed to replicate the physical display of the program board to a digitized form, was by using a Microsoft Visio tool. This resulted in solving most of the challenges faced with the distributed teams. This gave the offshore teams a clear visibility and understanding of feature dependencies, and helped them participate effectively in the PI Planning meetings. However, this required some manual effort by someone in the team to create the paper program board to the digitized form

 Work and improve collaboratively: The purpose of applying this good RE practice of SAFe was to enable good communication and collaboration within globally distributed teams to develop shared understanding of RE process in SAFe. With globally distributed teams, one of the common problems is to align the offshore teams to the same business goal as in house members (onshore). As part of this practice, a resource model was proposed which helped the different roles in agile release train (ART) at the onshore location to coordinate with the members in the offshore team. It was recommended to have a business analyst at the offshore location who acts like a proxy to the product owner from onshore location. The business analysts helped in communicating the requirements to the offshore teams. The resource model helped the members to work and collaborate together, by sharing responsibilities, information, and build a positive team culture.

 Learning the RE process of SAFe: Since SAFe is a complex framework to understand, it requires training to have a better understanding of the process and achieve quality results in RE process. The teams without adequate training and coaching struggled with applying agile practices correctly in the RE process [4]. The case company project provided a well-established training and coaching system to enable people to learn the RE process of SAFe. This good RE practice applied in SAFe helped in overcoming the challenges faced during planning the requirements such as creating features that fits into one program increment (PI) and splitting them into user stories. It also helped in having a well-organized PI Planning meeting which provided a big picture of requirements to all members in distributed teams.

5.3 RQ3: Lessons learned from applying good RE practices in