A supporting tool for requirements change management in distributed agile development

Abstract

Software development industry has witnessed the growth of the agile movement and approaches. Applying the agile approaches and practices in the distributed environment will lead to gain a lot of benefits such as reduced costs, higher efficiency and better customization, on the other hand it will face many challenges for example working in different time zones, requirements changes, personal selection and knowledge management. In order to gain these benefits, it should address the challenges that will face the agile approaches in a distributed environment. One of the main challenges is managing the requirements changes during the process of distributed agile software development. Only few researches published in the literature, addressed the problem of requirements changes during the development process in distributed agile development. Most of the published researches in this context are based on industrial experiences which increases the need for combining the industry with academia within this area. In this paper an approach to manage requirements changes in distributed agile development is introduced. This suggested approach works to fill the gap between the industry and research in distributed agile development by combining the industrial practice and academic technique. This approach is based on a proposed feature model called a features tree. The approach is associated with a supporting software tool that helps to manage the requirement changes in distributed agile development. The supporting tool is tested and evaluated in real environments by software development professionals using an exhaustive set of criteria, and the results are promising.