A Conceptual Model to Address the Communication and Coordination Challenges during Requirements Change Management in Global Software Development

Abstract

Global Software Development (GSD) is a widely used development practice because of various advantages offered to the customers, vendors, and other stakeholders involved in a software project development. However, GSD is not a simple process as it faces multiple challenges that arise due to the mismanagement of the communication and coordination process. Meanwhile, Requirements Change Management (RCM) is a tedious and high resource-consuming process in GSD, which is further negatively affected by the poorly managed communication and coordination mechanisms. Multiple research studies have presented various theoretical and conceptual models to overcome the challenges during RCM in the GSD context. However, the current methodologies lack in handling the communication and coordination challenges during the RCM process in the GSD context. In the literature, the researchers have concluded that a conceptual model can effectively reduce the communication and coordination challenges during RCM in GSD. Inspired by this, the current work aims at proposing a conceptual model to overcome and mitigate the communication and coordination challenges, while ensuring the effective requirement changes at offshore software development sites. Moreover, it would help multiple stakeholders in understanding and managing the necessary resources before initiating the RCM process. To validate the proposed conceptual model, we have conducted a questionnaire-based survey to procure the results from the industrial experts working in the GSD domain. After analyzing the obtained results, we found that the proposed conceptual model is effective to handle the communication and coordination challenges up to 87%. In addition, almost 87% of the experts have agreed upon the correctness, identified challenges, and the mitigation practices in the proposed conceptual model necessary to improve the RCM process in the GSD context. Furthermore, it was observed that 75% of the experts also agreed upon the practical implementation of the proposed conceptual model in the software development industry to observe the heuristic performance of the proposed conceptual model.