Using distributed agile patterns for supporting the requirements engineering process

Abstract

This chapter discusses the challenges practitioners face while choosing to develop their projects at offshore locations. As offshore development introduces new challenges in the software development process such as trust, socio-cultural, communication and coordination and knowledge transfer issues, it has been observed that these challenges affect how requirements are defined and managed while using agile practices in offshore software development. Using the notions of Distributed Agile Patterns we discuss how they can facilitate the requirements engineering process in offshore software development. We present a catalogue of the complete set of patterns, but only gave details of selective patterns from the catalogue that are related to the requirements engineering process. The whole catalogue is available online for anyone interested in it. At the end we developed a process flow showing the distributed agile patterns mapped onto the traditional requirements engineering process to show how these patterns address and improve the requirements engineering process for agile offshore projects.