Competencies Desirable for a Requirements Elicitation Specialist in a Global Software Development

The global software development poses several challenges in software engineering, particularly in the elicitation stage, owing to the problems of communication and coordination which are caused when teams are geographically distributed. For a successful requirements elicitation in a global development environment, it is necessary to rely on professionals who are capable of confronting the challenges that arise in this environments such as: cultural differences, distributed communication and coordination. In order to develop in software engineers the skills suitable to face these challenges it is first necessary to discover which competencies or skills they should have or develop. In this work we describe an analysis carried out with this goal, therefore we propose a list of competencies desirable by a requirements elicitation specialist, which have been obtained from a review of the related literature. We also comment on certain useful strategies in the teaching of these competencies and propose the usage of a simulation environment for their development.