Cultural Influence on Requirements Engineering and Its Impact on Software Quality

Abstract

Requirements engineering is the most critical phase of any software. If the requirements are correctly elicited, gathered, and then propagated, the software's success chances get high. Like other critical technical aspects of software development, some other factors also exist that directly or indirectly affect the software requirements phase of the software. Culture is one of these factors which affects the requirements engineering phase positively or negatively. This work aims to probe the relationship of organizational culture on software requirements with particular reference to Pakistan. This study embraces a quantitative methodology and examines the important aspects of organizational culture over software requirements and the type of the relationship that organizational culture has with software requirements. Influence of each identified factor on the RE process has been shown in this research. Data was gathered from 204 employees, i.e. (N=204) of Pakistani Software Houses having different Ages, Gender, Job positions, and education levels. Results showed that Software requirements, a critical stage of software development, is negatively affected by our IT organizations' organizational cultures.