Global Requirements Engineering on the Cloud PhD Research Proposal

Global software development is a business model that involves software development distributed beyond national boundaries. However, distributed nature of the processes makes it very challenging to communicate and collaborate. Requirements engineering is an intensive software development life cycle activity and involves frequent communication among the stakeholders. In global software development, tight project schedules and global distance give rise to incomplete requirements handovers from one site to another. Therefore, the need for an efficient mechanism becomes inevitable as information available to one project team can often contradict what is available to the other. On the other hand, Software as a Service (SaaS) is one of the deployment models of the cloud that can provide multiple users with a web space to collaborate on things of mutual interest. In this research, we propose a SaaS based mechanism to facilitate globally distributed software development teams working on the requirements engineering process. Our emphasis is on the situation that occurs after requirements are handed to another software development site.