Multilevel Ontology Framework for Improving Requirements Change Management in Global Software Development

Requirements engineering is one of the most important pillars of software engineering. Its success contributes greatly to that of the software as a whole. In fact, the software development process is not devoid from changing requirements, which affects the cost, time, and quality of the final software. The change problem is unavoidable and also swells when the development of the software is made globally. Therefore, there is a need to improve the quality of requirements change management (RCM), especially in global software development (GSD) environments. Our research hypothesis is that the RCM is naturally a knowledge-intensive process that can benefit substantially from ontology. Indeed, we assume that using a multilevel ontology framework will greatly support RCM in GSD environments by ensuring the semantic correctness of the requirement change request and accordingly solving miscommunication and misunderstanding problems. The framework was successfully evaluated using a questionnaire and a case study. The results indicate that using the proposed framework can intensely improve the semantic correctness of requirement change requests. Accordingly, the entire RCM process is then improved by increasing the reliability of the change and reducing the time consumed for dealing with semantically wrong change requests.