Identification of Cultural Influences on Requirements Engineering Activities

Requirements Engineering (RE) involves critical activities to ensure the accurate elicitation and documentation of clients' requirements. RE is a socio-technical activity and requires intensive communication with several clients. RE activities might be considerably influenced by individuals' cultural background because culture has a deep impact on the way in which people communicate. However, there has been limited exploration of this issue. We present a framework that identifies and analyses cultural influences on RE activities. To build the framework, we employed Hofstede's cultural model and a mixed-methods design comprising two case studies involving two cultures: Saudi Arabia and Australia. The evaluation highlighted that the framework provides high accuracy to identify cultural influences in other cultures as well.