Requirements Negotiation and Conflict Resolution in Distributed Software Development : A Systematic Mapping Study and Survey

The main aim of this thesis is to explore the industrial practices of requirements negotiation and conflict resolution within distributed software development. The motivation for this study is to get insight of the industrial practices in particular interventions (Communication tools, Models, Communication media) that used by practitioners to resolve requirements negotiation and conflicts resolution between clients and suppliers, since many researchers purposed interventions in the literature for requirements negotiation and conflicts resolution in distributed software development. Context: In Requirements Engineering, requirements negotiation and conflict resolution are crucial activities to achieve a common ground between clients and suppliers, it is considered as one of the crucial factors for delivering successful software. However, the shift from traditional collocated practices to a distributed environment offers both benefits and drawbacks which were studied earlier by researcher, but surprisingly there are few studies with insight of exploring the distributed requirements negotiations and conflict resolution practices. This research investigates the state of requirements negotiation and conflict resolution activities in distributed software development with an insight on their importance and relevance to this research area. Objectives: Overall goal of this thesis is to understand how requirements negotiations and conflict resolution are performed in distributed software development, knowing what are the available tools to perform requirements negotiation and conflict resolution, whether these existing tools are good enough to cope up with the industrial practices, knowing most widely used tools, methods and approaches, most importantly does the present research able to bridge the gap with in distributed software development? Methods: This thesis study comprises of two research methodologies. 1. Systematic mapping study (SMS)- To identify the proposed interventions in the literature to perform requirements negotiation and conflict resolution activities in Industrial Software Development within a distributed environment. 2. Industrial Survey- To identify industrial practices to perform rei quirements negotiation and conflict resolution in Industrial Software Development within a distributed environment. Results: 20 studies were identified through systematic mapping study (SMS). After analyzing the obtained studies, the list of interventions (Preparatory activities/communication tools/ Models) were gathered and analyzed. Thereupon, an industrial survey is conducted from the obtained literature, which has obtained 41 responses. Effective communication media for preparatory activities in requirements negotiations and conflict resolution are identified, validation of communication tools for effective requirements negotiations and conflict resolution is performed. Apart from the validation, this study provided list of factors that affects the requirement negotiations and conflict resolution activities in distributed software development. Conclusions: To conclude, the obtained results from this study will benefit practitioner in capturing more insight towards the requirements negotiations and conflict resolution in distributed software engineering. This study identified the preparatory activities involved for effective communication to perform requirements negotiation activities, effective tools, models and factors affecting of requirements negotiations and conflict resolution. In addition to this, validation of results obtained from the literature is carried through survey. Practitioners can be benefitted from the end results of by knowing the effective requirements negotiation and conflict resolution interventions (Communicational tools/ Models/ Communication media) for early planning in distributed software development. Researchers can extend the study by looking in to the real-time approaches followed by the practitioners to perform the both activities in the direction of future studies