<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.

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.