Stakeholder Collaboration and Requirements Quality in Agile Projects

Abstract

Purpose: Agile teams are told that close collaboration with stakeholders produces good requirements, yet many teams with frequent ceremonies still commit to ambiguous, conflicting or untestable user stories. This review asks which collaboration mechanisms, rather than how much collaboration, account for requirements quality in agile projects. Method: A mechanism-based integrative review of requirements engineering, agile empirical research, traceability, testing and cross-domain governance literature published up to 2024 was conducted, with appraisal focused on construct definition, temporal ordering and outcome measurement. Synthesis: Six mechanisms recur: product owner decision authority, breadth of stakeholder representation, discipline of backlog refinement, cadence of validated feedback, right-sized documentation and the resulting shared understanding. The evidence suggests that interaction frequency improves story quality mainly when authority to close decisions is clear and when affected groups, including security, privacy and operational stakeholders, contribute before sprint commitment. Contribution: The article proposes ACCORD (Authority, Coverage, Cadence, Observable shared understanding, Refinement discipline, Documentation sufficiency), six falsifiable propositions, formal indicators such as a weighted representation coverage index and a QUS-based story defect density, and a validation design. Implications: Teams should manage decision latency, representation gaps and story defect density as leading indicators, and treat meeting volume as a cost rather than evidence of quality. The propositions are untested and require prospective field studies.