User-centric requirements elicitation framework for global software development teams

Abstract

The requirements elicitation is considered as the foremost important activity of software development process with ultimate goal of requirements finalization for anticipated project. It is well accepted in the software engineering domain that an effective requirements elicitation process vitally contributes in success of software development endeavors. It is evident from the available state-of-art literature and industry practices that requirements elicitation process is critically dependent on participant’s personality traits due to its highly social and collaborative context. Furthermore, the role of user’s personality traits becomes a core pivot for requirements elicitation process in traditional inhouse as-well-as modern global software development practices. In global software development context, the role of user’s personality traits in requirements elicitation process is further raised due to high variations in user’s geographical locations having different cultural norms. Moreover, the user’s personality traits-based user-centricness in requirements elicitation process greatly improves the overall process of requirements elicitation. Accordingly, there was a serious need to formulate a novel user-centric requirements elicitation framework incorporated with user’s personality traits for global software development teams. In order to inspect this imperative issue, the dependency of requirements elicitation process on user’s personality traits is investigated to find the impact of user’s personality traits on requirements elicitation process. Consequentially, a user-centric requirements elicitation framework has been devised for global software development teams. The applicability and validity of the proposed framework has been evaluated using experimental approach at academic level pilot-test as-well-as industry level real-test. The evaluation results highlighted an overall quality improvement of 11.3% in requirements elicitation process for global software development teams. The evaluation results also revealed a more specific improvement of 31.6% in quality factor of correctness, 31.1% in quality factor of completeness and 20.6% in quality factor of consistency. The obtained results have fully justified the applicability of the formulated framework in the domain of software engineering.