Abstract
There is a need to identify requirements engineering (RE) practices that are important to global software development (GSD) project success. The objective of this paper is to report our recent empirical study results which aimed to identify the RE practices that are important to GSD projects. This study used an online survey questionnaire to elicit data from 56 RE experts of GSD projects. The survey included 66 RE practices identified by Sommerville et al. for non-GSD projects. The participants were asked to rank each RE practice on a four-point scale to determine the degree of importance of each practice in the context of GSD projects. This research identified a set of six key RE practices that mainly focuses on GSD project stakeholders, scope, standards and requirements traceability management. One common theme that is evident from the RE experts' feedback analysis is the standardization of requirements documents to reduce requirements inconsistencies and improve communication in diverse and distributed GSD project environments Our results show that not all 66 RE best practices are important for GSD projects. We believe that a good understanding of the identified RE practices is vital in developing and implementing the situation-specific RE processes for GSD projects.
Highlights
Global Software Development (GSD) offers several benefits to client companies outsourcing their development work to vendor companies
We address the following Research Questions (RQ) in this paper: RQ1: Which requirements engineering (RE) practices are critical for GSD projects? RQ2: Do the identified critical RE practices for GSD vary across the different expertise levels? RQ3: Do the identified critical RE practices vary across experts from different company types? RQ4: Are these critical RE practices related to the size of the GSD companies? We have used the word ‘‘critical’’ in order to distinguish between practices which are important to be considered by GSD companies
WORK We identified through this empirical study RE practices which are perceived to be critical for GSD projects by RE experts
Summary
Global Software Development (GSD) offers several benefits to client companies outsourcing their development work to vendor companies. A variety of software development tasks are outsourced, previous work suggests that most of the factors contributing to the failure of outsourcing are related to requirements [7], [8] This is not surprising given that the requirements engineering (RE) process significantly impacts the effectiveness of all software development processes [9] including GSD [10]. Research shows that due to globalization, RE community needs to improve different RE processes in order to cope with diverse roles, collaboration needs, better decision making, cultural understanding, changing domain knowledge and organizational structures [34], [36]–[40]. In order to improve RE processes in GSD, we are interested to identify different practices, which can be used in different RE processes
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