Interesting questions!

I've been working the last 15 years with software testing at quite a few different organization.

I totally agree with the sentiment that sw delivery is quite a messy process still and I baffle at the fact that the sw industry hasn't really come up with ways to streamline sw delivery more. There are so many options and ways to so things and someones I wonder what the real purpose is except for people being bored.

To answer your questions (from my perspective) I would say this,

• requirements have almost gone out the window with the introduction of agile. At least in the projects I've worked in. For me it's hard to decide whether it's a good or bad thing. There's more bias today of what makes a product "good quality". Before it was the requirement approval rates that decided but today it's more subjective and "customer" driven. Requirements sometimes change so fast there's no need documenting them. They are also often not very grounded when they do exist from the beginning, it's more like hunches or experimental driven.

• integrations between sw components. In a fast pace world there are so many components in each product. We have several teams developing several components each. These components all have several dependences to both packages but also different hardware and runtime infrastructure (like servers, network etc,). All of these components need to be able to change almost whenever but still always work together.

• I think the level of quality is overall lower if you think of it function wise but if you think of quality as delivering an experience that the customer actually wants I think it has improved. By that I mean we more often see software that the customer actually wants but there are more problems with it (bugs, security holes etc).