Requirements Change Management Challenges of Global Software Development: An Empirical Investigation

Muhammad Azeem Akbar,Muhammad Tanveer Riaz,Muhammad Shafiq,Wishal Naveed,Lulwah Alsuwaidan,Abdu Gumaei,Abeer Abdulaziz Alsanad,Ahmed Alsanad

doi:10.1109/access.2020.3035829

Abstract

The software organizations rapidly adopting global software development (GSD) to gain the economic and strategic benefits. Besides, GSD faces many challenges that mainly concerned with the requirements change management (RCM). This study aims to identify and empirically validate the factors that can negatively influence the RCM process in GSD. To this end, literature review and questionnaire survey were conducted for the investigation and validation of RCM challenges. A total of 31 RCM challenges were identified. We have further classified the identified challenges in organization types, organization size and based on experts' opinions with the aim to provide a clear understanding of the RCM process and its challenges to the practitioners. Based on these identified challenges, we believe that this study can provide a framework for tackling problems associated with RCM activities in GSD environment, which is significant to success and progression of GSD organizations.

Highlights

The requirements change management (RCM) is a difficult and crucial stage in requirements engineering process compared with other engineering aspect[1]
At third phase of this project, we have explore the list of RCM challenging factors using systematic literature study [33], in this study, we conducted empirical study to get the insight of industry practitioners with respect to the critical challenging factors
The rapid increase in the adoption of global software development (GSD) motivated us to investigate the challenging factors of RCM process

Summary

Introduction

The requirements change management (RCM) is a difficult and crucial stage in requirements engineering process compared with other engineering aspect[1]. The change in requirements can be demanded at any time and at any stage of development process (from requirements collection to maintenance)[1]. The activities of RCM process considered as more communication and coordination oriented that hard to manage in onshore or near shore software development environment [5, 6]. There is a significant expansion in the adoption of GSD in the low developing countries. They seek to outsource software development activities with the motivation of employing skilled human resources at significant low cost, enjoy round the clock working hours and to easy access the international market[10,11,12,13,14,15]

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