Impact of organizational structure on distributed requirements engineering processes: lessons learned

The requirements engineering program at Siemens Corporate Research has been involved with process improvement, training and project execution across many of the Siemens operating companies. We have been able to observe and assist with process improvement in mainly global software development efforts. Other researchers have reported extensively on various aspects of distributed requirements engineering, but issues specific to organizational structure have not been well categorized. Our experience has been that organizational and other management issues can overshadow technical problems caused by globalization. This paper describes some of the different organizational structures we have encountered, the problems introduced into requirements engineering processes by these structures, and techniques that were effective in mitigating some of the negative effects of global software development.