Stakeholders in Global Requirements Engineering: Lessons Learned from Practice

Due to its communication and collaboration-intensive nature, as well as inherent interaction with most other development processes, the practice of requirements engineering is becoming a key challenge in global software engineering (GSE). In distributed projects, cross-functional stakeholder groups must specify and manage requirements across cultural, time-zone, and organizational boundaries. This creates a unique set of problems, not only when an organization opens new development subsidiaries across the world but also when software development is a multiorganizational business affair. We need innovative processes and technologies to manage stakeholders´ expectations and interaction in global projects. This article reports on the state of the practice, drawn from industrial empirical studies, of stakeholders´ interaction in global RE. The article revisits stakeholders´ needs in global RE, discusses the challenges they face in distributed interaction, and offers practical advice to alleviate these challenges, as distilled from empirical studies of GSE practice