Reusing Requirements in Global Software Engineering

Abstract

Knowledge sharing and reuse in global software engineering (GSE) are challenging issues. Knowledge management (KM) is specifically impacted because on top of distance, culture and language mismatches, there is also the perceived risk of sharing something which could mean that others could take over some work. Mistrust and protectionism are often the consequence, leading to insufficient reuse. This is visible specifically in requirements engineering (RE), where all reuse should start. In this chapter, we will look to reuse in RE with a detailed look on how to improve knowledge sharing and collaboration in distributed environments. We first look into the state of the practice. Then we present a lightweight, reuse-based, global RE method called PANGEA (Process for globAl requiremeNts enGinEering and quAlity), based on natural language requirements and software engineering standards. Based on this method, we also build a prototypical tool, called PANTALASA (PANgea Tool And Lightweight Automated Support Architecture) which provides automated support for PANGEA. Its features are drawn from PANGEA and the state of the practice commercially available RE tools. A prototype of PANTALASA was developed by using Semantic MediaWiki and Facebook and applied to a case study in the domain of hotel management. We could show with this method and prototype that collaboration and thus KM and reuse in RE are improved.