A Conceptual Model of Requirement Engineering in Cloud Project Delivery for Thai Government Organizations

Abstract

The shift to cloud computing has affected the future of software engineering in several ways i.e., multilateral software development, scalability, and new technology stack such as an open-source software, plus infrastructure as code such as container, serverless architecture and software defined network (SDN). In order to support the cloud project delivery for government organizations, requirements engineering (RE) is a crucial step in software engineering that determines whether a project will be successful or result in a failure. RE steps include requirement elicitation, requirement analysis, requirement specification and requirement validation. Data is collected by semi-structured interview from the providers and the users of cloud services in 11 Thai government organizations, and from cloud service provider for meeting enterprise requirements and user requirements. The results reveal nine key issues that affect cloud project delivery: (1) lack of trust with external cloud service provider by generation X and baby boomer (2) lack of transparency as regards the legal agreement about the cloud user's personal data protection responsibility by cloud service provider, (3) the issues of reliability, security and service level agreements (4) lack of knowledge and lack of understanding of cloud technology (5) required training and a learning by doing (6) the policy to use government cloud services instead of developing their own cloud, (7) older people at top-level tend to resist cloud technology, (8) people in general lack of knowledge and understanding of cloud technology (9) problems about pricing model, it's impact on 23 cloud requirements (functional and non-functional) as well as factors that involved in RE phases. Based on these results this paper presents a Conceptual Model of Requirement Engineering for Cloud Project Delivery in Thai Government Organizations.