The Role of Ethnography in Agile Requirements Analysis

Abstract

The integration of ethnography analysis with agile methods is a new topic of the research of software engineering. In agile development, ethnography is particularly effective at discovering two types of requirements: the functions requested from customers and the functions observed from the ethnographic analyst. The proposed model depends on the role of ethnographic analyst in understanding how people operate actually and discover requirements that support software functionality. This help to predicts implicit system requirements that not defined by the organization. The proposed ethnographic model requires that the ethnographic analyst remain in the organization and observe the actual ways in which people work, rather than only the formal requirements documented by the organization.