The Challenges of Distributed Software Engineering and Requirements Engineering: Results of an Online Survey

Growing globalization and increasing complexity of software lead to international and national collaboration of geographically distributed organizations, sites and persons. Therefore, it becomes more important to understand and to know how to optimize distributed software development. Thus, we performed a survey among professionals on their experiences with distributed software development. We present an evaluation of 744 questionnaires, with a special focus on requirements engineering. The survey results show that a variety of human and process-related aspects are important for distributed software development. They furthermore emphasize the importance of communication in requirements engineering: Communication, particularly face-to-face meetings, represents the most frequently mentioned solution to diverse problems. Similar results were found before, but this survey supports them with a high quantity of data.