Cultural influence on requirements engineering activities: a systematic literature review and analysis

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) involves the critical activities required to capture customers’ requirements/needs accurately. RE is a communication-intensive activity. As culture plays a major role in the way individuals communicate and perform a task, RE activities might be strongly influenced by individuals’ cultures. However, there are very few published works on this issue. The goal of this study is to explore the influence of national culture on RE activities as reported in existing studies. We carried out a systematic review of literature from five digital databases supplemented with the snowballing technique to retrieve papers which were published between 1990 and 2018. By applying a thematic approach for the identification and analysis of cultural aspects, we identified 16 cultural characteristics that influence RE activities. The identified aspects were mapped into Hofstede’s cultural model. This study increases RE researchers’ and practitioner’s awareness of the influence of national culture on RE activities. The results of this study confirm that, to date, cultural studies in the field of RE are insufficient and more empirical studies are required.