A Framework for Software Customization in Global Software Development (GSD)

Abstract

Global Software Development (GSD) is an aspect of software engineering that requires the joint efforts of professional software from separate locations. The market is motivated to start GSD due to a lack of local software developers, inadequate resources, fixed budget, and time. Many companies have shifted to software development outsourcing because of the high availability of resources, which cost one-third less than onshore vendors, skilled and professional developers. Vendors improve their skills through outsourced project experience and learn new ways to satisfy client needs. However, many risks are involved in an outsourcing process. GSD becomes the latest and popular development in software engineering, brings a new opportunity to getting resource mobility, market speeding time, obtaining additional information, and also helps to increase operational efficiency. In this paper, we have presented a framework for software customization in global software development. We have divided our approach into two parts. In the first part, we have analyzed the current literature work on the requirement change management process to find the limitation, gaps, and issues of Requirement Change Management (RCM). Our focus is on proposing a framework for software customization in a distributed environment in the second part. In our framework, we overcome the gap between the client and teams and, with the help of a requirement graph, increase the understanding of change requests at the development site. We use the knowledge repository to save the record of a change request. To evaluate our research work, initially, we conducted a case study to evaluate our framework in a real-life context. We have applied the proposed framework on a case study of “Finance Automation” to prove the applicability of our proposed approach. Then we evaluate our framework with the help of the survey. In the survey, we get feedback from the people of different sectors. Lastly, we analyzed the feedback of the survey that is shown as graphed.