A method of requirements elicitation and analysis for Global Software Development

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.

CREeLS: Crowdsourcing based Requirements Elicitation for eLearning Systems

“…Ali and Lai [23] addressed the importance of communication and collaboration between stakeholders in the Global Software Development (GSD) context. We found that stakeholders in this context are comparable to stakeholders in eLS context, they are diverse in cultures, geographically dispersed, and there are times zones and language barriers, which made difficulties in engaging into an effective communication.…”

Improving a method to analyze the requirements for an information system for consistency

“…Thus, the requirement analysis method that helps to bridge the communication gap between a customer and a developer is offered in paper [4]. The method for analyzing requirements for software development, proposed in [6], is based on the joint participation of representatives of IT-project stakeholders. However, the results presented in [7] show that such methods can be improved by structuring the perception of the system created by the participants of an IT-project as a formal conceptual mental model.…”

Improvement of the method of scenario analysis of functional requirements to an information system

“…Thus, paper [9] proposed to reduce the number of errors in requirements by establishing a special method of requirements analysis that helps bridge the gap in communication between a customer and a developer. Article [10] suggests a method for identifying and analyzing requirements to software development, based on the joint participation of representatives of all stakeholders in the IT project.…”