Empirical Investigation of Critical Requirements Engineering Practices for Global Software Development

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.

Keywords

• Global software development (GSD)
• empirical study
• requirements engineering (RE)
• software outsourcing