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Cultural influence on requirements engineering activities: a systematic literature review and analysis

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Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) involves the critical activities required to capture customers’ requirements/needs accurately. RE is a communication-intensive activity. As culture plays a major role in the way individuals communicate and perform a task, RE activities might be strongly influenced by individuals’ cultures. However, there are very few published works on this issue. The goal of this study is to explore the influence of national culture on RE activities as reported in existing studies. We carried out a systematic review of literature from five digital databases supplemented with the snowballing technique to retrieve papers which were published between 1990 and 2018. By applying a thematic approach for the identification and analysis of cultural aspects, we identified 16 cultural characteristics that influence RE activities. The identified aspects were mapped into Hofstede’s cultural model. This study increases RE researchers’ and practitioner’s awareness of the influence of national culture on RE activities. The results of this study confirm that, to date, cultural studies in the field of RE are insufficient and more empirical studies are required.

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Notes

  1. According to Google Scholar, Hofstede’s work has been cited more than 83,000 times, retrieved 27/05/2019.

  2. https://figshare.com/account/projects/67790/articles/9702326.

  3. https://figshare.com/account/projects/67790/articles/9702314.

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Acknowledgements

The first author is supported by a scholarship from Taibah University, Saudi Arabia.

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  1. School of Science, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

    Tawfeeq Alsanoosy, Maria Spichkova & James Harland

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  1. Tawfeeq Alsanoosy
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Correspondence to Tawfeeq Alsanoosy.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Overview of the selected studies

See Table 10.

Table 10 List of the identified studies
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Appendix 2: Quality assessment scores of the selected studies

See Table 11.

Table 11 Quality assessment scores
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Alsanoosy, T., Spichkova, M. & Harland, J. Cultural influence on requirements engineering activities: a systematic literature review and analysis. Requirements Eng 25, 339–362 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-019-00326-9

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