A method of requirements change management for global software development

Abstract

Context: Requirements change is an inevitable software development activity and can occur due to changes in user requirements, increased understanding of the stakeholders’ needs, customer organizational re-structure, and availability of new technologies. Timely management of these changes is vital to successful software development, which can be achieved through a rigorous requirements change management (RCM) process. RCM is not straight forward in collocated software development; and with the presences of geographical, social, cultural and temporal factors in Global Software Development (GSD), it makes RCM even more difficult for GSD. Existing RCM methods do not take into consideration of the GSD issues. Objective: In this paper, we present a method for managing requirements changes for GSD. Method: Our method consists of three stages: (i) an understanding of the changes required between different GSD sites is to be established; (ii) a change analysis is to be performed with respect to the development work, which might be either directly or indirectly affected by the changes; and (iii) a finalization of the changes will be made between GSD sites. Past researchers used student groups in a university environment to play the roles of stakeholders in experiments in GSD studies. We validate our method by applying it to a case study of an online shopping system, where the roles of stakeholders were played by a group of students. Results: The results showed that our method facilitates stakeholders to manage requirements changes for GSD better than the existing methods could. Conclusion: Managing changes in requirements at the right time improves the chance of developing a GSD project successfully by minimizing the risks associated with it.