A framework to resolve requirements engineering issues in software development outsourcing

The outsourcing of software development processes has become a common practice in the IT market due to its reported benefits in terms of cost reduction, process improvement, and optimal resource usage. However, a considerable proportion of outsourcing projects fail to materialize the anticipated results. The failure reasons are often traced back to Requirements Engineering (RE) processes. This establishes the importance of RE for software development outsourcing. We aim to help reducing RE issues in software development outsourcing by proposing a literature and empirically-based framework that maps RE issues to relevant best practices. We intend to perform a literature review, employ questionnaire-based surveys, and conduct semi-structured interviews with practitioners to identify RE issues and best practices to resolve these issues. In this paper we present our research plan to achieve our goal and briefly present our preliminary findings.