Requirements Change Management in Global Software Development: A Case Study in Pakistan

Global software development has been a phenomenon of growing interest for almost past decade or so; and its adoption trend continues to gain momentum. Globally distributed work is taken up as an alternative to single-site mainly because of the economic and strategic benefits it offers. Software development at geographically distributed environment is not a straightforward task and entails numerous challenges which are unique to this form of development. Requirements change management is considered challenging even in the best of conditions and it becomes even harder when performed at geographically distributed development locations. There is no existing model for managing requirements change in globally distributed software development context. This study uses qualitative research method to explore requirements change management process and investigates the underlying causes of requirements change in geographically distributed software development. The research work proposes a model for requirements change management for global software development. This model tries to incorporate the roles, activities and artifacts identified in the change management models.