Risk Generating Situations of Requirement Engineering in Global Software Development Huma Hayat Khan, Mohd. Naz’ri bin Mahrin, Suriayati bt Chuprat Advanced Informatics School Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia hkhuma2@live.utm.my , mdnazrim@utm.my , suria@ic.utm.my ABSTRACT Challenges of Requirements Engineering (RE) become adequate when it is performed in global software development (GSD) paradigm. “Risks” are the important elements for making RE more challenging. For having its in depth understanding, first there is a need to identify those factors which may generate risks during RE in GSD. Therefore a systematic literature review is done. The initial list leads to progressive enhancement for assisting in RE activities in GSD paradigm. This work is especially useful for the, less experience people working in GSD. KEYWORDS Systematic literature review (SLR), software Requirement engineering (RE), global software development (GSD), Risks 1 INTRODUCTION The emergence of globalization concepts has impacted almost every industry, both in positive and negative ways. The word globalization takes into account with multi cultural stakeholders on a single platform. Software industry is also influenced by this globalization by allowing multicultural stakeholders to work together in global platform recognized as GSD environment [1]. RE in GSD paradigm is one of the interesting research topics as described by cheng et al. [2]. This research rise for globalization in software industry is due to the number of advantages it has comparing with the traditional software development process. The advantages include; round the clock development, hiring workforce at low cost, maximum chance to the access the highly qualified global pool etc. The GSD paradigm describes the fact of under going changes to many RE activities as the participants are not collocated. The new paradigm of GSD increases the risks of project failure irrespective of its huge number of advantages. To cope up this issue, RE pitfalls due to GSD should be overcome. These pitfalls are mostly due to the differences of culture, languages, knowledge, times zone etc which vary among software development organizations in GSD paradigm. These changing situation factors are the main source of software failure which is specifically influential in RE process as discussed by [3, 4]. The goal of this paper is to identify and enlist the factors and the risks generated by these factors during RE in GSD paradigm. The work compiles the changing situation factors which should be taken care with to minimize the risks, which may lead to project failure. The identification is done from the existing literature by performing systematic literature review (SLR) [5]. In order to have unique identification of each of the risk generating factors, Grounded theory’s [6] data coding, constant comparison and memoing techniques are adopted. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section II describes the background of the study, section III illustrate the methodology of the study, section IV comprises of results, section V consist of discussion and section VI is the conclusion of the study. 2 BACKGROUND ISBN: 978-0-9891305-2-3 ©2013 SDIWC 221