Software Requirement Engineering Process Improvement For Outsourced Projects In The Case Ethio Telecom: Towards Identifying Improvement Areas
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Date
2018-06-04
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Lack of an adequate requirements specification, which is the product of a requirements engineering (RE) process, is the main reasons for the failure of software development. As a result, these days, organizations have begun to show interest towards improving their requirements engineering processes. In recognizing this fact, a lot of attempts have been done. This is also true for outsourced software development projects. There are at least two categories of RE practices that can provide to outsourced projects. The first category come from the basic RE practices which is studied by different researchers. Other set of RE practices is to overcome challenges faced by outsourced projects and few researchers studied on this area. However, little is known about the holistic conceptualization of issues for RE process in outsourced projects. Evaluation of the current state is the first step towards systematic process improvement. The aim of this study is to examine the current state of Ethio Telecom requirement engineering process for outsourced projects and identify improvement areas so that it can be improved.
This study employed combination of quantitative and qualitative single case study approach. In order to keep content validity both structured interview checklist and semi-structured interview outline contents were reviewed by selected interviewees and respondents before data collection began and the feedback is used to update the contents. In addition, for structured interview pilot test is conducted with selected respondents and checklist questionnaires are updated based on the feedback before structured interview began.
The quantitative study involved 70 respondents out of 105 potential respondents form different role such as FRS team, design team and project managers. Qualitative study involved 14 interviewees out of 20 potential interviewees form different role including TEP program manager and quality and process officer. In addition, as the third data source written and electronic documentations including Functional Requirement specification (FRS) documents is used. Content analysis method is employed to analyze qualitative data and descriptive statistics methods is used for quantitative data. Findings from this data source are triangulated to identify improvement areas.
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After examining the current state of Ethio Telecom requirement software engineering process, seventeen improvement areas are identified, it is an area which require improvement effort in order to improve Ethio Telecom requirement engineering process for outsourced projects. In addition, Percentage of practice guideline applicability in Ethio Telecom context vary from 94.29% -100%.
In key process area based requirement validation and management areas are identified to be the weakest RE areas as this RE areas practice usage value is 16.55% and 28.26% respectably and their practice guidelines usage lies between 0.5 to 0.83 which is very small as compare to others. The main reason for this is that, higher management are not aware of the importance of those practice. In order to improve the requirement engineering process, the researcher give practice improvement recommendation based on exhaustive literature review and REAIMS model practice implementation suggestions. After these improvement recommendations are validated by Ethio Telecom expert, the final improvement recommendation is given.
Keywords: Requirement engineering, Process improvement, Software development outsourcing, Key process area, Good practice, Improvement areas
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Keywords
Requirement engineering, Process improvement, Software development outsourcing, Key process area, Good practice, Improvement areas