Requirements validation techniques in GSD: A survey

Abstract

Global software development (GSD) is an emerging trend of software engineering. Seeking lower cost and accessing global resources pool are the main factors towards globalization of software development. GSD exhibits certain characteristics such as distance, time zone and cross-cultural differences that differentiate global software development from co-located software development. GSD makes many activities of software development difficult so as Requirements validation. Requirements validation can only be performed against the user's intention; thus the user's participation in the validation techniques is paramount. Traditional requirements validation techniques do not fit into issues imposed by GSD because of their inherent characteristics and shortcomings. In essence, they are designed for co-located development. This paper examines the existing requirements validation techniques, describes the issues in GSD, and evaluates them as well. The results show that some of the existing requirement validation techniques require extensive informal communication that is not convenient in GSD while other techniques which can be applied effectively in GSD are not very mature yet.