A Framework to Improve the Requirements Engineering Process for Software Development Outsourcing

The number of IT projects outsourced for software development is increasing day by day as outsourcing is anticipated to provide substantial benefits and the organizations which outsource the projects have certain constraints. But unfortunately, a considerable number of the projects which are outsourced for development are failed in realizing the estimated results. The failure reasons are often entrenched in Requirements Engineering (RE) process. Despite this, appropriate research efforts are not made to evade these unexpected consequences of software development outsourcing. The objective of this research is to propose a framework in order to improve the RE process for outsourced software development projects. This framework is based upon empirical studies with pertinent national and multinational organizations and RE practices introduced by Sommerville and Sawyer. We have used a survey research method for the data collection and preliminary results confirm that majority of the RE practices recommended by Sommerville and Sawyer are significant for the RE concerned with outsourced software development. Keywords—software development outsourcing; IT outsourcing; on shoring; domestic outsourcing; near shoring; offshoring; distributed software development; global software development.