Improving the Requirements Engineering Process Through Automated Support: An Industrial Case Study

Although Distributed Software Development (DSD) has been a growing trend in the software industry, performing requirements management in such conditions implies overcoming new limitations resulting from geographic separation. SIDIA is a Research and Development (R&D) Institute, located in Brazil, responsible for producing improvements on the Android Platform for Samsung Products in all Latin America. As we work in collaboration stakeholders provided by Mobile Network Operators (MNO) from Latin countries, it is common that software requirements be provided by external stakeholders. As such, it is difficult to manage these requirements due to the coordination of many different stakeholders in a distributed setting. In order to minimize the risks, we developed a tool to assist our requirements management and development process. This experience paper explores the experience in designing and deploying a software approach that facilitates (I) Distributed Software Development, (II) minimizes requirements error rate, (III) teams and task allocations and (IV) requirements managements. We also report three lessons learned from adopting automated support in the DDS environment.