Cultural Influences on Requirements Engineering Process in the Context of Saudi Arabia

Abstract

Software development requires intensive communication between the requirements engineers and software stakeholders, particularly during the Requirements Engineering (RE) phase. Therefore, the individuals' culture might influence both the RE process and the result. Our aims are to investigate the extend of cultural influences on the RE process, and to analyze how the RE process can be adapted to take into account cultural aspects. The model we present is based on Hofstede's cultural theory. The model was applied on a pilot case study in the context of the conservative Saudi Arabian culture. The results reveal 6 RE aspects and 10 cultural factors that have a large impact on the RE practice.

Overcoming Obstacles in Global Requirements Elicitation: A Multicultural Perspective

“…In high PDI orientation societies the level of trust is low (Hofstede 1980;. This was also observed in the study carried out by Alsanoosy et al (2018) and Hanisch et al (2001) in Saudi Arabia (PDI=95). Trust, was however, increasingly improved when a good relationship with customers / users was established during the requirements elicitation process (Hanisch et al 2001).…”

“…This gap propagates the problems towards modelling/specification design and implementation of the final product, and finally may end up in the production of a system which does not meet customer needs and requirements (Damian and Zowghi 2003). Despite the importance of requirements elicitation and the problems caused by an inability to understand and meet customer/user requirements (Dijksta 1972;Alsanoosy et al 2018), insufficient attention has been paid to this area in Software Engineering (SE) research. Basic semantic differences in viewpoints may also exist when attempting to engage in meaningful dialogue between the problem owning and the problem-solving communities (Bostrum 1989).…”

“…Opinions by top-management showed that high authority people were more valued and taken into consideration when capturing and specifying system requirements. The needs of customer/user were considered less important (Alsanoosy et al 2018;Hanisch et al 2001), even though their viewpoint, as main stakeholders, is particularly significant in defining customer/user needs and expectations. Thanasankit and Corbitt (2000) reported that the requirements elicitation was slow, because each time the software engineer in the high PDI country (Thailand, PDI=64) wanted to move forward to gather more requirements he/she needed to get approval from people higher up in the organization.…”

The human side of Software Engineering Teams: an investigation of contemporary challenges

“…Culturally induced problems were the most frequent problem type reported in interviews with software professionals [14]. Cultural distance may lead to misunderstanding and misinterpretations about things that were said and done in a project, as reported by many case studies investigating Chinese professionals [15], [16], [17], [18], Irish teams outsourcing parts of their workforce to other countries [19], [20] and other teams of various culture backgrounds [21], [22]. Misunderstandings and conversational dominance of specific interlocutors due to varying levels of language proficiency can however be managed to a degree if they are recognised, e.g.…”

Requirements Engineering for Global Systems: Cultural, Regulatory and Technical Aspects

“…A number of studies demonstrated that the cultural diversity has to be taken into account to make the system sustainable and applicable in a global context, see [3,4,5,9,18]. In the proposed approach, we investigate how to manage the diversity of cultural and technical aspects (as well as the correlations between them).…”