Understanding the Cultural and Social Impacts on Requirements Engineering Processes Identifying Some Problems Challenging Virtual Team Interaction with Clients

There has been growing interest in virtual teams, and more specifically in virtual software development. Requirements engineering, which is a crucial phase in software development provides another dimension when software development occurs in a virtual domain. While formal software development methods are the obvious first choice for project managers to ensure a virtual software development team remains on track, the social and cultural aspects of requirements engineering cannot be ignored. These social aspects are especially important across different cultures, and have been shown to affect the success of an information system. The discussion in this paper is centred around the requirements engineering processes of a virtual team in a Thai Software House. This paper proposes a framework indicating that project managers need to encourage a balance between formal methods and social aspects in requirements engineering for virtual team members Jo Hanisch, Theerasak Thanasankit, Brian Corbitt