Many companies today work with Scrum. Yet their Product Backlogs are overloaded, User Stories aren’t completed in a Sprint and regularly roll over into the next one. The team works from Sprint to Sprint—but the mountain of open requirements barely shrinks.

The introduction of Scrum was often justified with a clear goal: “We want to get faster.”
This is a sentence I’ve heard for years in nearly every company. Agile methods are seen as synonymous with speed, flexibility, and quick results.

But this is where the misunderstanding begins.

Speed Was Never the Real Goal

The original idea behind the Agile Manifesto wasn’t to complete projects as quickly as possible.
Instead, it aimed to prevent teams from spending months or years working on solutions that ultimately miss the customer’s needs.Rather than defining all requirements upfront, development happens incrementally:

Requirements are refined
Software is implemented
Users provide feedback
Insights feed into the next iteration

This learning process increases the likelihood of building the right product. But it also inevitably leads to additional coordination and changes.

Agility replaces long planning phases with continuous learning.

What Studies Actually Show

Scientific research confirms this picture.
A frequently cited study by Serrador and Pinto, involving over 1,000 projects, shows that agile projects perform better in customer satisfaction and adaptability. However, there is no clear evidence that agile projects are completed faster overall.

Investigations into large agile organizations reveal a similar pattern. The larger the project, the more coordination, architectural work, and requirements management become necessary. As project size increases, structured processes don’t disappear—they become even more important.

The Biggest Misconception: Agility Replaces Requirements Engineering

In many companies, a dangerous fallacy has taken root in recent years:
“We’re working agile. So we don’t need classic Requirements Engineering anymore.”

In reality, Requirements Engineering happens every day in Scrum projects.
Every User Story must be:

Understood
Aligned
Prioritized
Described
Reviewed
Accepted

That’s Requirements Engineering.
Only the artifacts and timing differ.
Instead of one large specification document, requirements emerge continuously throughout the project.

The Product Owner Carries a Huge Responsibility Today

With Scrum, much of the responsibility for requirements shifted to the Product Owner. Yet this is where a common weakness appears.
Many Product Owners have excellent product knowledge and deep stakeholder insights. But the role now demands far more than prioritization and backlog maintenance.

Professional Requirements Engineering has become one of the most critical competencies for a successful Product Owner.
What they often lack are the methods of professional Requirements Engineering:

Stakeholder analysis
Conflict management
Business process analysis
Modeling complex workflows
Defining measurable acceptance criteria
Quality checking requirements
Traceability
Handling non-functional requirements

These skills are often assumed in Scrum but rarely developed systematically.

Good User Stories Don’t Happen by Accident

A common misconception is: “We just write User Stories.”
But good User Stories are the result of careful analysis.
If you don’t understand the real needs of users, you’re just packaging unclear requirements into smaller chunks.

The consequences are:

Questions during development
Different interpretations
Frequent rework
Technical debt
Unnecessary debates in every Sprint

Many teams experience exactly this—and then blame Scrum.

poor requirements cost time in every sprint

In truth, the problem often lies in missing foundational Requirements Engineering skills.
A Product Backlog doesn’t replace requirements analysis. It only documents the outcome.

Agile Projects Invest Differently – Not Less

Traditional projects invest a larger portion of effort upfront. Agile projects spread that effort across the entire timeline.
That’s why agile projects often appear to start faster. But in reality, analysis, alignment, and prioritization happen continuously.
The analytical effort doesn’t vanish. In many Scrum projects, it’s merely deferred.

Instead of thoroughly analyzing requirements before development, discussions happen during the Sprint. Developers ask questions, Product Owners make rushed decisions, and User Stories get revised. These are the very delays Scrum was meant to avoid.

Agility Needs Better Requirements Engineering

Especially because agile projects thrive on short decision cycles, professional Requirements Engineering becomes more important than ever.
A Product Owner shouldn’t just understand the product—they should master the methods that create good requirements.

These include:

Systematic stakeholder analysis
Facilitating conflicting interests
Process analysis
Clear modeling (possibly with UML)
Formulating verifiable requirements
Defining clear acceptance criteria
Prioritizing by business value
Continuous validation with users

These skills often determine whether an agile team works efficiently or gets bogged down in misunderstandings Sprint after Sprint.

Conclusion

Agility doesn’t automatically make projects faster. It makes change easier. That’s a crucial distinction.
Those who equate agility solely with speed will inevitably be disappointed. But those who see it as a tool to reduce risk and learn faster will recognize its true value.

Professional Requirements Engineering hasn’t become obsolete in agile projects.
On the contrary:
The more agile a project is, the more important it becomes to deliver the right requirements at the right time and in the right quality.

Perhaps this is the most important lesson of the past twenty years of agility:
The most successful Scrum teams I know don’t spend less time on requirements—they spend more. The difference is that they do Requirements Engineering continuously and systematically before every Sprint. That’s why their backlogs stay manageable and their User Stories get completed within a Sprint.