A Requirements Engineering Framework for International Projects: a Case Study Approach

The increasing globalization entails in software projects that need to meet requirements from not only a single organization within a country but multiple organizations from various countries. Requirements Engineering is already a difficult process when it is done in a local context. An international context significantly exacerbates the challenging nature of Requirements Engineering as requirements need to be specified across organizational, cultural and language boundaries. The goal of this study is to create a Requirements Engineering framework for software projects in an international context. The study is carried out on behalf of an enterprise that faces an increasing number of international software projects. Input for the study are modern Requirements Engineering approaches in literature, research reports regarding Requirements Engineering in international software projects and the analysis of two projects of the commissioning enterprise. Based on this input a holistic framework is created. The framework is based on three different layers: people, process and technology.