Significant Requirements Engineering Practices for Software Development Outsourcing

Abstract

The volume of software development outsourcing is growing enormously owing to the associated benefits of outsourcing and limitations of organizations. However, a large number of the projects outsourced for software development are failed to achieve anticipated results. In most of such cases, the reasons for failure are traced back to the Requirements Engineering (RE) process. In spite of this state of affairs, adequate efforts have not been made to avoid the failure of outsourced software development projects due to RE process issues. This research has been conducted with the aim of cultivating the RE process for software development outsourcing by identifying the significant RE practices for this process. The study is based upon Sommerville and Sawyer's RE practices for six key areas of the RE process. A survey research method has been used to collect data from 108 practitioners belonging to 18 national and multinational organizations associated with software development outsourcing. After analysis of the obtained data, we have identified the RE practices which are significant in order to improve the RE process for software development outsourcing and hence to achieve desired results.