The influence of power distance on requirements engineering activities

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) activities are inherently collaborative, requiring software stakeholders to have intensive communication to identify users’ requirements. As the stakeholders’ culture might heavily impact on the way how they collaborate and communicate, RE might be significantly influenced by their cultural background. To analyse stakeholders’ culture, we use one of the most adopt and comprehensive cultural studies in software engineering: Hofstede’s cultural model. Hofstede’s model has six cultural dimensions, where one of them is Power Distance (PD). The aim of this study is to explore the influence of PD cultural aspects on RE activities. We conducted 32 interviews with software developments/requirements engineer practitioners from two different cultures: Saudi Arabia and Australia. Our results revealed that PD significantly affect RE collaboration among software stakeholders. In this paper, we address the core identified cultural aspects as well as the ways to overcome them. The results that we present in this paper would help to increase awareness of the influence of PD, and thus, improve collaboration within RE activities.