Risks and Safeguards for the Requirements Engineering Process in Global Software Development

The rise of new development paradigms such as Global Software Development (GSD) forces Requirements Engineering (RE) to face up to new challenges and risks not common in traditional development models. When an organization first embarks upon a GSD project it exposes itself to plenty of risks. Many of these risks appear as a result of the lack of experience of the development team on GSD projects. A Systematic Literature Review (SLR) has led to the compilation of a repository which gathers the risks that concern RE when developed in a distributed software development environment, as well as a set of safeguards, which help overcoming such risks. This repository, open to progressive enrichment, provides a novel basis to assist in RE activities for GSD projects. It could be especially useful when the developers have little experience in distributed projects and cannot prevent communication, distance, cultural, or organizational risks. Although the repository collects the main contributions from published work in the field, it has not been validated on real GSD projects yet.