A Requirement Elicitation Methodology for Global Software Development Teams

Abstract

Failures during the elicitation process have been usually attributed to the difficulty of the development team in working on a cooperative basis (Togneri, Falbo, & de Menezes, 2002), but today there are other points that have to be considered. In order to save costs, modern software organizations tend to have their software development team geographically distributed, so distance between members becomes one of the most important issues added to the traditional problems of the requirement elicitation process (Brooks, 1987; Loucopoulos & Karakostas, 1995). So far, literature has widely analysed real life Global Software Development (GSD) projects and pointed out the main problems that affect such environments, especially related to communication. As a complementary view, we have focused our research on analysing how cognitive characteristics can affect people interaction in GSD projects, especially during the requirement elicitation process, where communication becomes crucial. In this article, we present the main characteristics of requirements elicitation in GSD projects and introduce a cognitive-based requirement elicitation methodology for such environments.