Requirements Volatility in Multicultural Situational Contexts

Requirements’ volatility refers to additions, deletions, and modifications of requirements during the system development life cycle. Different approaches in software development, including Agile and DevOps, have addressed requirements volatility by increased user participation throughout the whole development process. In this paper we analyse requirements volatility from a situational context angle with the aim to increase understanding of the role of culture and cultural diversity in a multicultural requirements elicitation process. Research on situational context in Requirements Engineering (RE) is rather limited, despite the recognized importance of RE and requirements elicitation for improving the quality of the final system and software product. This paper builds on an extensive literature review demonstrating the importance of raising awareness and understanding of the role of culture and cultural diversity for requirements volatility, as one of the most significant situational factors in the requirements elicitation process, with the aim to improve the whole systems development process as well as the resulting products and services. The paper concludes with the presentation of the Requirements Cultural Volatility Framework which aims to reveal potential conflicts that may occur in requirements elicitation on a multiplicity of cultural dimensions, The framework proposes actions to be taken in order to address the conflicts and point out expected benefits on each dimension.