No abstract

To perform requirements elicitation and analysis, effective communication and collaboration between stakeholders are necessary. Global Software Development (GSD), where software teams are located in different parts of the world, has become increasingly popular. However, geographical distance, cultural diversity, differences in time zones, and language barriers create difficulties for GSD stakeholders in engaging in effective communication. Taking into consideration the factors involved in GSD, previous research showed that the ways by which requirements are gathered and analyzed for collocated software development cannot be used effectively for GSD. Thus, in this paper, we present a method of requirements elicitation and analysis for GSD. The method consists of 4 stages: (1) data collection; (2) educating stakeholders about GSD issues; (3) post-education assessment; and (4) requirements elicitation and analysis.Past researchers used student groups in a university environment to play the roles of stakeholders in experiments in GSD studies. Likewise, we preliminarily validate our method by applying it to a case study of an online shopping system, where the roles of client, requirements engineer, project analyst, and designers were played by a group of students.

No abstract

Global software development (GSD), where software teams are located in different parts of the world, has become increasingly popular. However, GSD involves issues such as geographical distance, cultural diversities, differences in time zones, and language barriers amongst stakeholders, making it different from collocated software development, and requirements engineering (RE) is very much affected by these issues. To examine what stakeholders think about the impact of these factors on the different activities of RE in a GSD environment, we have conducted a survey among organizations located in different parts of the world which were involved in GSD. In this paper, we present the findings of the survey. The survey pointed to the facts that stakeholders are not very aware of the risks and challenges associated with GSD, that stakeholders are not clear about how the geographical dispersion of development teams could affect the RE process, and that the lack of RE methods for GSD makes stakeholders use the conventional techniques and approaches of RE that do not consider the factors involved in GSD. The findings of our study will enable readers to gain a better understanding of what different groups of stakeholders think about RE in GSD.

Global Software Development (GSD) is multi-site software development with software teams scattered across different places around the world. To gain the benefits of the lower cost of software development and access to international talents, many organizations are using GSD. However, earlier studies reported that achieving these benefits can be difficult and GSD involves risks. This paper presents a systematic review of GSD and aim to provide the findings about the current practices, benefits, associated risks, and difficulties associated with it.The review was conducted in accordance with the systematic review procedures and processes defined by Kitchenham. By following these guidelines, six digital libraries to gather information on the prevalent trends and practices in GSD were searched. The outcomes presented in this study are based on 204 studies, published in peer-reviewed conferences and journals. Our findings will enable readers to understand the current practices, benefits, risks and difficulties associated with GSD. As a result, they can form realistic expectations before making a decision to engage in GSD or not, and formulate better pre-contract and post-contract planning in order to increase the chances of project success. A merit of this paper as compared to previous survey papers on GSD is that it reports the issues related to cultural diversity, requirements engineering and software architecture.