An Insight into the CAS Requirements Engineering - Qualitas AG

About the job

Everyone is talking about digitalisation, and it is making no exception for agriculture. The goal is to fundamentally change, simplify, refine, or completely automate the work on various levels. With this ever-accelerating digitalisation in agriculture, the upstream and downstream sectors must also keep pace. The transition to agile working and the introduction of a Requirements Engineer is one way for companies in the downstream sectors to keep up with the rapid pace. The CAS Requirements Engineering at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts helped me to learn the necessary methods and tools.

Digitalisation makes no halt before agriculture

The future of agriculture is digital. Farmers expect this to simplify and relieve their daily tasks. The agri-high-tech sector is growing about four times faster than the rest of the agricultural sector. This concerns companies that advance the digitalisation of agriculture with technologies.

Photo: swissherdbook

However, it often happens that the entire technology grows faster than the companies themselves. Qualitas also feels this ever-accelerating digitalisation. In the last ten years since its founding, the number of employees has doubled and the working methods have changed several times. For over two years now, agile working based on Scrum has been implemented. This transition to agile working was an important and correct step to keep pace with the rapidly growing technologies in agriculture. A major advantage of this transition is the high flexibility and agility. Short sprints and installation cycles of four weeks allow us to present initial solutions to customers promptly and respond directly to their feedback. Regular meetings and a backlog ensure high transparency. Yet, even at Qualitas AG, most IT projects fail or are significantly delayed, among other reasons, because the goal formulations were imprecise and there was a lack of clear requirements. Especially with Scrum, it can be dangerous if requirements change after every sprint and sprints are planned too defensively. The methods of Requirements Engineering (RE) are now intended to help with this.

Great hopes are placed in Requirements Engineering

The RE determines the customers' demands on the end product through various methods and compiles a requirements specification. The RE should

understand the needs of the stakeholders,

ensure a common language between the customer and the software developer,

record the requirements appropriately and bindingly in writing

The use of stakeholder maps

A helpful method for understanding the stakeholders of a project is the stakeholder map.

With the help of this map, it is easier to classify the interests and influence of the various involved stakeholders and thus try to understand their needs. It is now crucial to find out how to convey to the stakeholders that they are important for the project's success and to try to arouse their interest. Once this is achieved, there are various methods to support the correct capture of requirements.

How about the Six Thinking Hats method?

It is important first to define the vision and goals together with the various interest groups. One must understand the worlds of the different involved persons precisely, as they usually know what they want but often not exactly what. At the beginning, it is difficult to define and formulate the correct "altitude" of requirements. Wishes and needs are usually presented to us REs on a low level and are often seen by customers as "just very small adjustments that can be done quickly." However, the view of the big picture is missing, and the room for interpretation is huge. Therefore, it is important to work out the goals concretely together with the customers. Depending on the type of project, various creativity techniques can help. One type of creativity technique is, for example, the Six Thinking Hats method. The six hats represent six different roles that are swapped after a certain time to break fixed ways of thinking.

The advantages of the sentence template

After capturing the requirements, it is important that they are recorded in writing in an appropriate manner. Sentence templates are suitable for this. The structure of the sentences is always the same, and the content is detached from the technical implementation. This is intended to ensure that both customers and software developers understand exactly what the requirement is.

Conclusion on the CAS Requirements Engineering and thanks to Qualitas and HSLU

Thanks to the support from Qualitas, I was able to learn various methods within the framework of the CAS Requirements Engineering at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts that help me with the collection, documentation, verification, and management of requirements. We also gained insight into the integration of RE in organisations and deepened our knowledge in communication and conflict management during the CAS. I am now very pleased to apply and deepen what I have learned in the business environment, having already been able to use it during the specialisation project in the course of my training.