How Internationalization of a Product Changes Requirements Engineering Activities: An Exploratory Study

This paper explores the Requirement Engineering (RE) activities in two software product development organizations. Both companies have in recent years extended their product offering outside of their home market. In this paper, we wish to answer what RErelated challenges companies have faced in their journey of introducing their software products in new market areas and what have the companies done in their response to their new RE-related challenges. We believe that the results of this paper are important for practitioners and researchers alike. While increasing the academic understanding on the role of internationalization in market-driven requirements engineering, the paper also helps practitioners to anticipate some of the challenges that they may meet in their internationalization efforts. We have discovered that there may be inconsistencies between the nature of the challenges companies are facing and the strategies companies have taken to respond to the challenges. In addition, many of our findings are human interaction related indicating that the social aspects may still be an undervalued topic in RE research.