Requirement Change is one of the most challenging tasks in software development lifecycle, particularly in the complex context of Global Software Development (GSD). During the last decade, many studies are carried out to address these problems, however, careful examination of these works suggests that there's a potential research gap. This paper has performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify the most significant/commonly studied challenges of requirement change management process and furthermore this process under GSD context. We identified ten challenges such as impact analysis, cost estimation, artifacts documents management, requirement traceability, requirements dependency, conflicts with existing requirements, time estimation, change prioritization, user involvement, and system destabilizing. Furthermore, three challenges such as communication and coordination, knowledge sharing, management, and Change Control Board (CCB) management are identified for globally distributed projects. We also mapped these identified challenges to Requirement Change Management Process (RCMP) outcomes proposed in our previous study. We believe that mapping between RCM challenges and RCMP outcomes will enhance the practical significance of this study results. Considering the systematic literature review results, we suggest that there is a need to develop a framework for requirement change management for quality software systems development.
Requirement changes are inevitable, and Requirement Change Management (RCM) is a complex process in software development. In-house software development and Global Software Development (GSD) are two widely used development approaches and there is a need to explore the RCM commonalities and differences in the two development approaches. The primary objective of this study is to identify the challenges that influence RCM in both approaches. First, we have implemented Systematic Literature Review (SLR) and identified 9 challenges that impact the general RCM process and 3 more challenges related to RCM with GSD. Second, we have conducted a questionnaire survey based on SLR results and collected feedback from 69 industry practitioners. The survey result indicates that there are four out of nine challenges, namely impact analysis, requirement traceability, requirement dependency, and system instability having the same impact in both in-house and GSD approaches. On the other hand, cost/time estimation, artifacts documents management, user involvement, requirement consistency, and requirement prioritization need more attention while implemented in GSD paradigm. Furthermore, regarding two important project management structures in GSD, centralized project structure and distributed project structure, the survey results reveal that all challenges have same impact except user involvement and change control board management, which are more important in centralized project structure. Lastly, the result from t-test indicates that both data sets retrieved from SLR and survey are close to each other. This study distinguishes RCM challenges in in-house and GSD approaches and in the context of two prominent project management structures followed in GSD projects. It would assist researchers by providing potential research directions and industry professionals to understand and implement RCM in different context more efficiently. INDEX TERMS Requirement change management (RCM), global software development (GSD), challenges, global project structures, systematic literature review (SLR).
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