Impact of requirements volatility and flexible management on GSD project success: A study based on the dimensions of requirements volatility

Global software development (GSD) is a modern approach that is currently being adopted by software organisations, mainly because of significant return on investment it produces. In the GSD projects, the development teams operate under the three distributed dimensions: geographical, cultural and temporal distances which increases substantial communication difficulties and becomes the development activities more challenging especially related to requirement volatility. The objective of this study is to identify the relationship between requirements volatility, and GSD project success. We have proposed a GSD risk-based model that consider project performance risk as a mediating variable for analysing the impact of requirement volatility on GSD project success. A questionnaire study was conducted from the 103 GSD experts to validate the proposed model. The findings reveal that requirements volatility increases the project performance risk which has a negative impact on the GSD project success which can be managed by the flexible management.