Towards the Successful Requirements Change Management in the Domain of Offshore Software Development Outsourcing: Preliminary Results

Abstract

Majority of the software development industries motivated to adopt the phenomena of global software development (GSD) due to huge return on investment. While adoption of GSD, various challenges are faced by the software industries particularly associated with to requirements change management (RCM). The purpose of the paper is to explore the challenging factors of RCM that faced by GSD organizations. To do this, systematic literature review (SLR) approach is adopted to explore the challenging factors of RCM process in GSD. Using the SLR method, a total 15 challenging factors were identified from the 26 selected primary articles. The investigated challenging factors were further categorized based on firms’ types (client-vendor) and time periods (2001-2009 and 2010-2017). The purpose of this categorization is to assess the significance level of each investigated challenging factor with respect to firms’ types and time periods. The paper also highlighted the critical challenging factors of RCM process by following the criteria of a factor having frequency ≥ 50% as critical. The outcomes revealed that five out of fifteen challenging factors are critical for the executing the RCM activities in GSD. We are confident that the results of this study will be useful in tackling the challenges related to RCM process in GSD that is significant for developing the quality projects.