Considerations for Effective Requirements Analysis in Offshore Software Development Projects: Lessons from Multi-Method Research

Offshore software development using geographically distributed teams is an accepted practice in software development today. However, software development companies have largely only offshored the software development lifecycle’s coding and testing phases. However, lately, offshoring the requirements...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Communications of the Association for Information Systems 2016, Vol.39, p.188-213
Main Authors: Yadav, Vanita, Adya, Monica, Nath, Dhruv, Sridhar, Varadharajan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Best practice
Geographical distribution
Life cycle analysis
Offshore
Outsourcing
Requirements analysis
Software development
Software industry
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Summary:Offshore software development using geographically distributed teams is an accepted practice in software development today. However, software development companies have largely only offshored the software development lifecycle’s coding and testing phases. However, lately, offshoring the requirements analysis (RA) phase has become increasingly viable for several reasons including the software industry’s maturation and improved communication technologies. However, successfully evaluating this highly interactive phase between geographically dispersed client and provider teams requires special considerations. In this paper, we present practical insights garnered from conducting experiments and surveys of IS professionals from the Indian software industry and from extensively examining the literature. Our findings confirm that, subject to certain best practices, one can effectively conduct RA in software projects offshore. We present these practices as lessons learned and provide related recommendations for industry and academia.
ISSN:1529-3181
1529-3181
DOI:10.17705/1CAIS.03911