  Requirements engineering (RE) is considerably different in agile development
than in more traditional development processes. Yet, there is little empirical
knowledge on the state of the practice and contemporary problems in agile RE.
As part of a bigger survey initiative (Naming the Pain in Requirements
Engineering), we build an empirical basis on such aspects of agile RE. Based on
the responses of representatives from 92 different organisations, we found that
agile RE concentrates on free-text documentation of requirements elicited with
a variety of techniques. Often, traces between requirements and code are
explicitly managed and also software testing and RE are aligned. Furthermore,
continuous improvement of RE is performed due to intrinsic motivation.
Important experienced problems include unclear requirements and communication
flaws. Overall, we found that most organisations conduct RE in a way we would
expect and that agile RE is in several aspects not so different from RE in
other development processes.
