Abstract
Global Software Development (GSD) is a widely used development practice because of various advantages offered to the customers, vendors, and other stakeholders involved in a software project development. However, GSD is not a simple process as it faces multiple challenges that arise due to the mismanagement of the communication and coordination process. Meanwhile, Requirements Change Management (RCM) is a tedious and high resource-consuming process in GSD, which is further negatively affected by the poorly managed communication and coordination mechanisms. Multiple research studies have presented various theoretical and conceptual models to overcome the challenges during RCM in the GSD context. However, the current methodologies lack in handling the communication and coordination challenges during the RCM process in the GSD context. In the literature, the researchers have concluded that a conceptual model can effectively reduce the communication and coordination challenges during RCM in GSD. Inspired by this, the current work aims at proposing a conceptual model to overcome and mitigate the communication and coordination challenges, while ensuring the effective requirement changes at offshore software development sites. Moreover, it would help multiple stakeholders in understanding and managing the necessary resources before initiating the RCM process. To validate the proposed conceptual model, we have conducted a questionnaire-based survey to procure the results from the industrial experts working in the GSD domain. After analyzing the obtained results, we found that the proposed conceptual model is effective to handle the communication and coordination challenges up to 87%. In addition, almost 87% of the experts have agreed upon the correctness, identified challenges, and the mitigation practices in the proposed conceptual model necessary to improve the RCM process in the GSD context. Furthermore, it was observed that 75% of the experts also agreed upon the practical implementation of the proposed conceptual model in the software development industry to observe the heuristic performance of the proposed conceptual model.
Highlights
Global Software Development (GSD) is a widely adopted and appreciated practice to achieve numerous development benefits such as reduced development time, cost, and accessing the best global development teams [1]–[7]
WORK In this study, we proposed a conceptual model to improve the communication and coordination challenges faced during the offshore software development process
Multiple limitations in the existing conceptual or theoretical models and frameworks were analyzed based on which the proposed conceptual model was designed, while after the analysis process, it was discovered that no conceptual model or theoretical has focused on the improvement of the communication and coordination challenges faced during the Requirements Change Management (RCM) process in GSD
Summary
Global Software Development (GSD) is a widely adopted and appreciated practice to achieve numerous development benefits such as reduced development time, cost, and accessing the best global development teams [1]–[7]. The major benefits include accessing highly skilled software developers, crosssite software development, innovation and shared practices, closer proximity to clients and markets, reduced development time and cost, and time zone effectiveness (Figure 1). It was observed that there exists no conceptual or theoretical model or framework to reduce the communication and coordination challenges while managing the requirements change in GSD. The analyzed limitations in the current stateof-the-art literature motivated us to propose a conceptual model to effectively address the challenges that occurred during RCM in the GSD context.
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