Story-Wall: Supporting Agile Software Development in a Distributed Context

The majority of commercial requirements management tools tend to be costly, document-driven and used by large organizations undertaking traditional forms of software development. While they are not immediately in the spirit of the agile philosophy, which advocates live dialogue over documentation and encourages small teams of developers to do the simplest thing possible to satisfy a requirement, there are some fundamental practices supported by these tools that play a role in more agile forms of software development. This paper examines the core requirements management needs that are common to software development of all flavors, at a high level, and describes a tool concept designed to bring lightweight requirements management to the agile (predominantly XP) context. This work is based on the experiences of a globally distributed team that uses agile development practices to develop and maintain ibm.com, and on their transition from manually handling paper-based story cards to the use of first generation story management tools.