CMMI and Agile: Requirements Development

As stated by CMMI the Requirements Development process area has the following purpose:

The purpose of Requirements Development (RD) is to elicit, analyze,
and establish customer, product, and product component requirements.

Every product has requirements, they are the foundation of design. So, such a foundation must be well understood and managed. There are various phases: elicitation, analysis, validation. Of course we should prioritize requirements, do excellent communication with all relevant stakeholders in order to avoid misunderstands.

Of course changes to requirements come just after the initial phase, even in first design approaches some issue can emerge and make a (hopely minor) change to some requirement.

Is that so extraneous to “Agile way”?

Absolutely not…

We can call them user stories, scenarios, use cases, and so on. The customer presence is a really desirable thing but we can accomodate that (common) absence with rapid interation (feedback loop) with her or - most commonly as in Scrum - with a Product Owner (internal to our team, like a Customer Proxy).

Finally, don’t forget that CMMI must be implemented - and not applied - because it is a MODEL. A model that can fit well with agile methodologies and - more generally - with an agile point of view.