A Requirements Engineering Process Adapted to Global Software Development

Abstract

Global software development is spreading increasingly within companies. Although it provides some competitive advantages, such as speeding up the software delivery, reducing cost, and taking advantage of more economic resources, this working model is a very complex one. Threats, such as geographic distance and cultural differences, may impact negatively on activities and artifacts of the software process. Untreated threats usually affect the quality of the requirements, propagating defects to subsequent development phases. Global software development threats were studied in a real major project, where no special treatment was put into practice to mitigate them. Analyzing the serious consequences on that project, a proposal was developed using a Lexicon model and Scenarios in order to mitigate threats to requirements in this distributed working mode. The proposal was applied in a new real project of similar characteristics, and the comparison of results from both projects gives promising perspectives in terms of requirements quality and process time improvements.