Empirical exploration of critical challenges of requirements implementation in global software development

Abstract

AbstractRequirements collection is difficult and a critical phase of software development life cycle, in particular in a global software development (GSD) environment. In GSD, clients and vendors are physically separated such that there exist challenges such as lack of face‐to‐face communication, language differences, culture variation, and time zone differences. The objective of current research is to identify critical challenges of requirement engineering in GSD. There is no work done yet to empirically analyze all possible challenges via questionnaire survey from software industries. This research paper empirically investigates and analyze the identified challenges from systematic literature review (SLR) based on a questionnaire survey. For this purpose, 50 respondents from different countries are organized. From this research, 13 challenges during requirements implementation in the context of GSD have been identified previously via SLR. These challenges were then evaluated using an empirical approach of questionnaire survey. The results from respondents were analyzed based on type of respondents, level of experience of respondents, and from client–vendor perspective. Finally, the challenges were prioritized based on its frequency of occurrences from the SLR and the questionnaire survey. The relationships between the challenges and the survey results were evaluated using the Spearman's correlation coefficient. The results produced a 0.835 Spearman's correlation coefficient at significance level ρ = 0.000, which showed a strong positive correlation between the outcome of SLR and survey with no significant difference. The implication of this research work lies in both fundamental and practical perspective. The prioritized set of challenges was provided based on SLR, and questionnaire survey acts as a knowledge base for both researchers and industrial practitioners. This work will help researchers to identify challenges in GSD projects or other software engineering areas.