Scope creep is considered one of the crucial reasons for the failure of traditional software development projects. The ability to manage and control the change elements on a project, particularly the project scope, is a key to project success. The notion of the agile process was introduced to tackle the scope change-related challenges such as scope creep. By adopting an agile-footed process, the development organizations can react to the consistent market changes and client requests. However, continuous change accommodation may negatively impact the success of the targeted project since the project manager mainly focuses on controlling scope change rather than analyzing its impact on the cost and quality. The agileprocess advocates have accepted that this situation could happen even following agile methodology, which prompts compromising the quality, postponed plans, increment cost, plan to modify, and diminished consumer loyalty. Additionally, the scope-related challenge significantly increases, especially when managing scope creep in the global software development (GSD) context. Thus, there is a need to focus on scope creep factors in the context of AGSD. Motivated by this, current work aims at identifying the factors causing scope creep in the context of AGSD. To achieve the targeted objectives, we reported the current state-of-the-art related to existing scope creep models of AGSD. We adopted SLR and empirical study to address the formulated research questions. The current study also identifies the additional challenges of scope creep from the industrial perspective. Based on the obtained results, the current work proposes a conceptual model for scope creep to assist the agile practitioners to effectively handle the scope creep, which increases the project success and forecast change control effect on a software project. Moreover, the proposed conceptual model's effectiveness is validated through expert judgment and a case study. The obtained promising results ensure the additional aspects of AGSD; hence, we could overcome the project's overall risk by implementing the proposed model.

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Global Software Development (GSD) is widely used by software development organizations to ensure the development of a cost-effective software product. GSD has now become a common engineering practice adopted by a significant number of multinational software development organizations, and even individuals (freelancers) are seeking numerous benefits including low development cost, highly skilled workers, and access to better development ideas. However, communication and coordination challenges remain a prominent research issue in the GSD context, while performing different project-related activities especially for Requirements Change Management (RCM). As a result, improper communication and coordination during RCM require additional time, cost, and development resources. Thus, it is of vital importance to ensure proper communication and coordination before initiating a software project. Inspired by this, current work aims at exploring and mitigating the communication and coordination challenges during RCM in the GSD context. To accomplish the targeted research objective, we performed a tertiary study to provide a landscape of the challenges that occurred during RCM in the context of GSD. Based on the performed study, we found 62 communication and 14 coordination challenges. In total, 107 mitigation strategies are explored and reported that effectively address the categorized sub-challenges of communication and coordination. Moreover, we proposed a conceptual model useful to address the communication and coordination challenges for the RCM process in GSD. Furthermore, we consulted the domain experts for the validation of the proposed conceptual model. Based on the promising results, we believe that this work supports the project managers in managing the cost and time-related issues in the GSD context. Consequently, the proposed conceptual model would help in optimally utilizing the scared software development resources. INDEX TERMSGlobal software development; Requirements change management; Communication and coordination challenges; Mitigation strategy; Tertiary study. I.

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Global Software Development (GSD) is expanding quickly all around the world because of the various advantages offered to the customers, vendors, and other stakeholders involved in software project development. However, GSD is not a simple process as it faces multiple challenges that arise due to the mismanagement of the communication and coordination process. Meanwhile, Requirements Change Management (RCM) is a tedious and high resource-consuming process in GSD, which is further negatively affected by the poorly managed communication and coordination mechanisms. Multiple research studies have presented various theoretical and conceptual models to overcome the challenges during RCM in the GSD context. However, the existing methodologies lack in handling the communication and coordination challenges during the RCM process in the GSD context. In the literature, the researchers have concluded that a conceptual model can effectively reduce the communication and coordination challenges during RCM in GSD. Inspired by this, the current work aims at proposing a conceptual model to overcome and mitigate the communication and coordination challenges, while ensuring the effective requirement changes at offshore software development sites. Moreover, it would help the multiple stakeholders in understanding and managing the necessary resources before initiating the RCM process. To validate the proposed conceptual model, we have conducted a questionnaire-based survey to procure the results from the industrial experts working in the GSD domain. After analyzing the obtained results, we found that the proposed conceptual model is effective to handle the communication and coordination challenges up to 87%. In addition, almost 87% of the experts have agreed upon the correctness, identified challenges, and the mitigation practices in the proposed conceptual model necessary to improve the RCM process in the GSD context. Furthermore, it was observed that 75% of the experts also agreed upon the practical implementation of the proposed conceptual model in the software development industry to observe the heuristic performance of the proposed conceptual model. INDEX TERMSGlobal software development; Requirements change management; Communication challenges; Mitigation practices; Conceptual model. I.