Situational requirement engineering in global software development

Abstract

In global software development (GSD), teams from different geographies are involved in software development activities from requirement till management phase. There are many potential benefits associated with GSD environment such as development cost, round the clock development, accessibility to better skilled people and many others. Although, organizations are achieving the benefits of GSD but its challenging nature such as cultural and language differences, trust relationship, coordination and communication is introducing numerous challenges that cannot be ignored. These challenges are significantly influencing requirement engineering (RE) process in GSD. One of the reasons behind challenging nature of RE in GSD is varying situational contexts such as social, communication and cultural contexts, language, human, technical and management related contexts. This necessitate for a comprehensive framework that demonstrates the perspective of situational contexts. This study aims to review the existing situational RE frameworks, highlights the reported situational contexts and provide future research directions. The literature revealed that the situational contexts are commonly related to twelve categories that include stakeholders, organization, requirements, project, management, risk, culture, standard, task, communication, technique and methods, and innovation. The situational contexts related to these categories show the main standpoint of situational software development in GSD. These situational contexts are significant for improving competencies of the team members while performing RE process in GSD environment. This study also draws attention towards some imperative research directions for further studies in line of situational software engineering.