RESUMEN

Global software development efforts have increased in recent years, and such development seems to have become a business necessity for various reasons, including cost, availability of resources, and the need to locate development closer to customers. However, there's still much to learn about global software development before the discipline becomes mature. This special issue aims to assess the gap between the state of the art and the state of the practice. It presents five articles that cover various aspects of global software development, including knowledge management strategies, distributed software development, requirements engineering, distributed requirements, and managing offshore collaboration. A Point/Counterpoint department discusses whether global software development is indeed a business necessity. This article is part of a special issue on Global Software Development.

RESUMEN

Due to its communication and collaboration-intensive nature, as well as inherent interaction with most other development processes, the practice of requirements engineering (RE) is becoming one of the key challenges in global software engineering (GSE). In distributed projects cross-functional stakeholder groups are tasked with specifying and managing requirements across cultural, time-zone and organizational boundaries. This creates a unique set of problems not only when an organization opens new development subsidiaries across the world, but also when software development is a multi-organizational business affair. This article presents a report of the state-of-the-practice, from industrial empirical studies, of stakeholders' interaction in global RE. The article revisits the stakeholders' needs in global RE, and discusses the challenges they face in distributed interaction. Practical advice to alleviate these challenges, as distilled from empirical studies of practice in GSE, is summarized at the end of the article. This article is part of a special issue on stakeholders in requirements engineering.