On the Risks and Safeguards for Requirements Engineering in Global Software Development: Systematic Literature Review and Quantitative Assessment

Requirements engineering (RE) is a critical process in software development which faces important risks when performed in a global software development (GSD) setting. Some of these risks are specific to GSD, while others also appear in co-localized environments but are aggravated in GSD. A systematic literature review (SLR) has been conducted to identify the risks to RE that occur in GSD, along with the safeguards with which to manage these risks. Inspired by a grounded theory approach, risks and safeguards have been elicited and grouped by means of collaborative tagging and cluster analysis techniques, and then bivariate correlation tests have been applied to measure the association between these risks and safeguards. The results of the SLR include the identification of a great variety of risks to RE in GSD (218), along with a large number of safeguards (146 in total). Starting from these results, a risks and safeguards repository that encompasses the entire state of the art on RE in GSD has been produced and is now publicly available. This repository can be used as a growing knowledge base by any organization interested in carrying out RE in GSD. The objective is to assist those organizations that are inexperienced in GSD to handle the problems that may arise when involved in a global development. The most common risks identified in the literature are related to: 1) knowledge sharing; 2) client and vendor relationships; 3) problems with process definition; and 4) communication problems. It was also found that in the literature, the risks related to management and project coordination, knowledge management and awareness, socio-cultural differences, and client-vendor distance are the ones most lacking in proposed safeguards; these are therefore concerns to which more attention should be paid.