Requirements Re-usability in Global Software Development: A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

In global software development, requirements re-usability is a common practice which ultimately helps to maintain project quality and reduce both development time and cost. However, when a large-scale project is distributed, there are some critical factors needed to be maintained and managed for reusing requirements and it is considered a challenging job to interrelate the requirements between two identical projects. In this study, we have pointed out 48 challenges faced and 43 mitigation techniques used when implementing requirements re-usability in global software development projects among distributed teams. The challenges distributed teams frequently encounter can be divided into three considering issues as Communication, Coordination and Control of distributed teams in global software development. The results from this study can be used to plan development strategies while reusing requirements in distributed manners.

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“…There were no studies that fit as opinion papers. The most common research facets were evaluation, with 15 papers [20, 26-32, 15, 33, 19, 34-37], followed by experience with 9 [38,14,39,11,[40][41][42][43][44], then philosophical with 8 [45,46,16,17,[47][48][49][50], and finally 5 from solution facet [18,51,52,12,53].…”

“…None of the SLR papers could be classified as a theory or a tool. The most present contributions facets were guideline, with 12 papers [38,45,20,28,16,11,47,43,44,[48][49][50], followed by lessons learned with 13 [26,27,29,46,30,17,31,40,32,19,34,42,36], then model facet with 5 [51,39,52,12,53], the framework facet with 5 [18,15,33,35,37], and finally advice with 2 articles [14,41].…”

“…Requirements specification is used to describe the desired behavior of a system through a formal and detailed specification. In agile, requirements are described as user stories, although, formal specifications were seen in GSD projects [50,20,19,44,49]. Goal: describe system behavior through a documented specification.…”

“…Otherwise, in the context of GSD, one article reported that specifications should be written for everything that is implemented [19]. We found that in GSD teams, some stud-ies pointed to the necessity of requirements documentation to make maintenance easier since the developers could consult the expected system behavior [49,37,52]. Furthermore, one article reported the documentation of use cases [34].…”

“…The use case points count was also used [28,46] and some cases were customized, estimating test effort only [17]. One article also reported as a mitigation strategy to the challenges of requirements re-usability the use of reuse metrics, in order, to quantify the number of re-used requirements in the project [49]. Finally, one study presented the use of traditional accuracy metrics in GSD projects, such as the magnitude of the relative error (MRE) or variation to assess the accuracy of their estimation techniques [17].…”