An Approach for Managing Requirements Changes in Distributed Agile Development

Abstract

The globalization affects many aspects in the process of industrialization development today, one of these industries is the software development industry. Recent years have also witnessed the growth of the agile movement and approaches. Applying the agile approaches and practices in the global or distributed environment will lead to gain a lot of benefits such as reduced costs, higher efficiency and better customization, on the other hand it will face many challenges for example working in different time zones, requirements changes, personal selection and knowledge management. In order to gain these benefits, it should first address the challenges that will face the agile approaches in a distributed environment. One of the main challenges is managing the requirements and its changes during the process of distributed agile software development and the impact of managing requirements on knowledge management between development team. Only few researches of the many approaches and practices published in the literature, addressed the problem of requirements changes during the development process in distributed agile development. Most of the published researches in this context discovered based on industrial experiences and this result in an increase of the need for combining the industry with academia within this area. In our proposed research an approach for distributed agile development to manage requirements and their changes, including the possible changes that have an impact on the knowledge management. Our suggested approach works to cover the gap between the industry and research in distributed agile development by combining the industrial practice and academic technique. Our research aims to develop a software development approach to enhance requirements changes management in distributed agile development.