<p>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 istaken up as an alternative to single-site mainly because of the economic and strategic benefits itoffers. Software development at geographically distributed environment is not a straightforwardtask and entails numerous challenges which are unique to this form of development.</p><p>Requirements change management is considered challenging even in the best of conditions andit becomes even harder when performed at geographically distributed development locations.There is no existing model for managing requirements change in globally distributed softwaredevelopment context.</p><p>This study uses qualitative research method to explore requirements change managementprocess and investigates the underlying causes of requirements change in geographicallydistributed software development. The research work proposes a model for requirementschange management for global software development. This model tries to incorporate the roles,activities and artifacts identified in the change management models.</p>

Context: Requirements change commonly occurs during the software development lifecycle. Requirements traceability is one of the important techniques to support requirement change management and analysis, ensure quality and keep requirements consistent during development. We find that existing research mentioned various issues and challenges during practicing requirements traceability, and the practitioners show certain obstacles on the subject. Major existing work of the area focuses on requirements traceability processes, frameworks, and techniques to address certain issues accordingly. And we want to focus on and investigate the existing challenges to practice requirements traceability systematically. Method: We investigate the requirements traceability and its challenges through a systematic literature review (SLR) of various concepts and existing challenges of requirements traceability, and a survey of 7 Chinese small-and-medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). With 7 interviews, we studied different traceability practices and situations with the surveyed companies under the possible impact of requirement change, development processes, tools, and other factors. And then we conducted conventional qualitative content analysis to identify and classify the challenges in practicing requirements traceability. Results: With the systematic literature review, we classified 14 categories of academic identified challenges. Through the collected data of the survey, we identified and discussed 6 categories of the requirement traceability challenges, involving costs, tools, awareness, documentation, etc. And we compared and discussed the connections and differences of the survey results with the literature for validation of our survey results and possible extension to the existing work. Through research, we may help the practitioners to deal with requirements change with traceability practice better by recognizing and preventing the obstacles. Our research may provide researchers with more information on practical situations. And in the future, researchers may study the traceability models more effectively aiming at addressing the existing problems.

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 istaken up as an alternative to single-site mainly because of the economic and strategic benefits itoffers. Software development at geographically distributed environment is not a straightforwardtask and entails numerous challenges which are unique to this form of development. Requirements change management is considered challenging even in the best of conditions andit becomes even harder when performed at geographically distributed development locations.There is no existing model for managing requirements change in globally distributed softwaredevelopment context. This study uses qualitative research method to explore requirements change managementprocess and investigates the underlying causes of requirements change in geographicallydistributed software development. The research work proposes a model for requirementschange management for global software development. This model tries to incorporate the roles,activities and artifacts identified in the change management models.

<p>Requirements Engineering (RE) is nowadays considered to be an activity, that aims at supporting the whole lifecycle of an information system by: eliciting, documenting, validating, and managing the requirements of the system. This thesis aims at providing an overview of the area of Requirements Management (RM) and to identify important and interesting issues or areas where further research is needed.</p><p>RM includes two major areas; organising requirements and requirements change management. Organising requirements is concerned with structuring the requirements and storing additional relevant information about them e.g. attributes and traceability information. Requirements change management is concerned with dealing with changing requirement in a systematic way i.e. making informed decisions whether to implement a certain change or not, and support the implementation of approved changes.</p><p>In order to provided a broader view of RM, the literature study were complemented by an interview study of how RM is conducted in practice. This interview study shows that the effort resources spent on RM differs substantially between different organisations. Various reasons for these discrepancies are elaborated in the work, but one of the main reasons are the type of software development that is conducted in the organisation. There is a tendency that organisations that develop software products and continuously releases new versions of there products are more likely to spend resources on RM, compared with organisations that develop customers specific solutions in one shoot projects. The need to reuse requirements and knowledge, as well as the maturity of the RE/RM process, are other factors that affects the resources spent on RM. The RM activities performed in practice are concordant with the activities found in literature.</p><p>A number of areas where further research is needed were identified: requirements change management, dependencies between requirements, RM tools, and information management</p>

Requirements Engineering (RE) is nowadays considered to be an activity, that aims at supporting the whole lifecycle of an information system by: eliciting, documenting, validating, and managing the requirements of the system. This thesis aims at providing an overview of the area of Requirements Management (RM) and to identify important and interesting issues or areas where further research is needed. RM includes two major areas; organising requirements and requirements change management. Organising requirements is concerned with structuring the requirements and storing additional relevant information about them e.g. attributes and traceability information. Requirements change management is concerned with dealing with changing requirement in a systematic way i.e. making informed decisions whether to implement a certain change or not, and support the implementation of approved changes. In order to provided a broader view of RM, the literature study were complemented by an interview study of how RM is conducted in practice. This interview study shows that the effort resources spent on RM differs substantially between different organisations. Various reasons for these discrepancies are elaborated in the work, but one of the main reasons are the type of software development that is conducted in the organisation. There is a tendency that organisations that develop software products and continuously releases new versions of there products are more likely to spend resources on RM, compared with organisations that develop customers specific solutions in one shoot projects. The need to reuse requirements and knowledge, as well as the maturity of the RE/RM process, are other factors that affects the resources spent on RM. The RM activities performed in practice are concordant with the activities found in literature. A number of areas where further research is needed were identified: requirements change management, dependencies between requirements, RM tools, and information management

In the mid-1990s, the European Union started to implement a union-wide,standardised signalling system, called European Rail Traffic Management System(ERTMS). This thesis has been developed alongside and targeted for a developmentproject such as the ERTMS system. The Comité Européen de NormalisationElectrotechnique (CENELEC) standards have been adopted by various transportauthorities to support and guide the safety processes of the signalling systems’development and design. These standards split the development of the products inthree levels: Generic Product (GP), Generic Application (GA) and Specific Application(SA). As a result of this development split, the errors encountered during the laterstages of development often experience an undesired and extended turnaround timebefore they are rectified. The aim of this thesis has been to determine reasons for thishigh turnaround time at Alstom and to propose corrective measures that could increasethe efficiency of the NCR management process adopted by the company. Data, from non-conformity reports (NCRs), has been analysed to obtain keyperformance indicators (KPIs) which have been discussed with employees whowork closely with the system and processes. The results from the data analysisand interviews have revealed issues in the NCR management process, the NCRmanagement system tool and input from the customer’s side. The results from thisresearch indicate that knowledge obtained from the fields of requirements engineering,software development life-cycle models (SDLC) and process-optimisation could beused without extensive additional effort to reduce the turnaround time in rectifyingerrors and optimise the process.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-03-05T14:01:21Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 0 Previous issue date: 24 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Muitas metodologias surgiram para organizar o desenvolvimento de software, a maioria baseada na previsibilidade dos requisitos. Como nem sempre é possível obter com exatidão todos os requisitos de um projeto antes de sua construção, torna-se fundamental saber gerenciar as mudanças de requisitos. A gestão da mudança compreende a análise de impacto, que visa identificar as entidades afetadas por uma mudança. A análise de impacto apoia-se fundamentalmente na informação de rastreabilidade, que consiste em ligações entre as informações produzidas no desenvolvimento de software. A informação de rastreabilidade tende a deteriorar durante a evolução do projeto mesmo em organizações com alto nível de maturidade no processo de desenvolvimento. Artefatos de software criados em um processo definido muitas vezes acabam desconectados uns dos outros devido à falta de métodos e de ferramentas que apoiem a rastreabilidade. As ferramentas atuais para gerenciamento de requisitos oferecem um apoio restrito para a manutenção da rastreabilidade. Poucas ferramentas cobrem todo o ciclo de desenvolvimento de software, sendo que a maioria não está preparada para tratar a informação de rastreabilidade com o grau de precisão necessário. Por fim, a maioria das ferramentas é centrada na ação do usuário, criando uma passividade que acaba possibilitando a ocorrência de falhas no processo de comunicação que podem determinar o fracasso de um projeto. Este trabalho tem como objetivo melhorar a gestão da mudança de requisitos por meio da implementação de uma ferramenta web apoiada por agentes de software que controlam com precisão a informação de rastreabilidade e suportam de forma pró-ativa a gestão da mudança de requisitos e a análise de impactos durante todo o ciclo de desenvolvimento de software. Conforme estudo realizado, para que isto seja possível, torna-se necessário a criação de um modelo para representar com precisão a informação de rastreabilidade em um projeto, bem como as mudança ocorridas e os impactos gerados. Como forma de testar e avaliar o trabalho proposto, foi realizado um estudo de caso onde se procurou utilizar a ferramenta durante o desenvolvimento de um sistema para gestão administrativa de uma instituição de ensino. / Many methodologies were created to organize the software development, most of them based upon the requirements previsibility premise. Since getting a precise set of requirements before the software construction is the exception, it is fundamental to manage the requirements changes. The change management comprises the impact analysis, which identifies the entities affected by a change in a system. The impact analysis is fundamentally supported by the traceability information, which represents the links between the information produced during the software development. The traceability information tends to deteriorate during the project evolution, even in organizations with a high level of maturity in the development process. Software artifacts created in a defined process gets disconnected due to the lack of methods and tools that support the traceability effectively. The actual requirement management tools offer a restricted support to maintain the traceability information. Few of them cover all the software development life cycle, and most of them are not prepared to give the necessary degree of granularity to the traceability information. Finally, most tools are focused on the user action, creating a kind of passivity that makes possible the occurrence of failures in the communication process. These failures may determine the complete project unsuccess. The objective of this work is to improve the requirements change management through the implementation of a web tool. This tool is supported by software agents that control the traceability information with a high degree of granularity and that support the change management and the impact analysis pro-actively through all the software development life cycle. According to the realized study, to make it possible, it is necessary to create a model that supports the representation of the granularity for traceability information, the occurred changes and the generated impacts. In order to test and evaluate the proposed work, it was performed a case study in which the tool was used during the development of a system for management of a education institution.

[pt] As contratações de Tecnologia da Informação (TI) pelas organizações da Administração Pública Federal (APF) são regidas por lei. No caso específico, a Lei 8.666/1993, tem o objetivo de disciplinar as normas para contratos da APF, obrigando o planejamento da contratação. É permitida a alteração do escopo do contrato mediante aditivos. A literatura de Engenharia de Requisitos enfatiza que o processo de definição de requisitos evolui, no entanto, isso muitas vezes é desconsiderado. Logo, há um nítido conflito quanto à definição dos requisitos na contratação de TI na APF em consonância com a legislação vigente. A obrigação que a legislação impõe aos órgãos de conhecer e definir os requisitos precocemente à contratação pode acarretar em problemas no gerenciamento do contrato. Essa dicotomia entre a mutabilidade nos requisitos e a rigidez legal no processo de contratação inspirou uma pesquisa exploratória com organizações públicas. Nossa pesquisa deixou mais transparente os problemas vivenciados por esses órgãos nas contratações de soluções de TI. Fazemos uma análise prévia desses problemas e apontamos possíveis soluções. / [en] Acquisition of Information Technology (IT) by the Brazilian Federal Government is governed by law. In the specific case, the Law 8.666/1993 is intend to establish the rules for such contracts, forcing their planning. The Requirements Engineering literature emphasizes evolves in definition process but this is often disregard. Therefore, exists a clear conflict in requirements definition during the IT acquire in Brazilian Federal Government with current legislation. Define requirements obligation before software procurement is impose by law and can generate problems in contract management. This dichotomy among the mutability requirements and legal rigidity in the procurement process had inspired an exploratory research with public organizations. Our research provide transparency in problems experienced by these agencies in procurement of IT solutions. We prepared a preliminary analysis of these problems and pointed out possible solutions.

全球化使得軟體開發活動轉移至新興或開發中國家，快速變動的商業環境則趨使軟體開發朝向敏捷開發演進，然而軟體境外開發產生工作分離現象，負面影響軟體開發績效，此外敏捷開發法與境外開發環境存在衝突，本研究將軟體開發方法視為一連續漸變的光譜，包含規劃導向、風險導向及敏捷開發等三階段，探討在境外開發的環境下，哪一類型的開發方法能夠擁有較好的績效表現，並能減緩工作分離的負面影響，其中軟體開發方法光譜與績效表現呈現曲線關係，工作分離負面影響敏捷開發端之績效表現，需求變動則負面影響規劃導向端績效表現，結論將從工作分離與需求變動程度觀點，分別探討不同情況下所應採取的專案執行方式。 / Affected by globalization, software development activities have transferred to developing country. On the other hand, driven by turbulent business environments, software development methods have become more flexible like agile method. However, work dispersion derived from offshore software development has negative impact on performance. Besides, offshore environments have conflict with agile method in some aspect. There is a need to know the fit of between development methods and offshore modes. This research view development methods as a continuous spectrum, consisting of plan-driven, risk-driven and agile methods, and will probe which part of the spectrum perform better in offshore context and can alleviate the negative work dispersion effect on performance. The result shows that software development spectrum and offshore software development performance have curvilinear relationship. Work dispersion has negative impact on agile method, while requirements change has negative impact on plan-driven part. We’ll conclude from work dispersion and requirements change perspective, discussing how should practitioners conduct offshore project in different situations respectively.

Business organisations today are faced with the complex problem of dealing with evolution in their software information systems. This effectively concerns the accommodation and facilitation of change, in terms of both changing user requirements and changing technological requirements. An approach that uses the software development life-cycle as a vehicle to study the problem of evolution is adopted. This involves the stages of requirements analysis, system specification, design, implementation, and finally operation and maintenance. The problem of evolution is one requiring proactive as well as reactive solutions for any given application domain. Measuring evolvability in conceptual models and the specification of changing requirements are considered. However, even "best designs" are limited in dealing with unanticipated evolution, and require implementation phase paradigms that can facilitate an evolution correctly (semantic integrity), efficiently (minimal disruption of services) and consistently (all affected parts are consistent following the change). These are also discussed / Computing / M. Sc. (Information Systems)