A Blockchain-Based Requirement Management Framework for Distributed Software Development Environment

Distributed Software Development (DSD) provides a mechanism to develop a software product through experts working remotely at different geographical locations. In the recent past, the COVID-19 pandemic registered distributed and offshore software development as a common practice for software organizations. However, distributed development raises several challenges, including trust, dependency, and completeness of a software requirement document, while establishing and coordinating a team of experts residing at different geographical locations. Furthermore, working remotely leads to a lack of process understanding and poor requirement change management. Thus, there is a need to streamline the requirement-baseline process for effective requirements management using emerging trends in the context of DSD. Blockchain can be suitable for tracking the requirement changes in a DSD process mainly due to the consensus, provenance, ownership, immutability, finality, and access control characteristics. Inspired by this, we propose a Blockchain-based RequirEment Management framewOrk for disTributed softwarE development (called B-REMOTE). To assess the effectiveness of B-REMOTE, we consider a real-world case study and compare the results in terms of requirement baseline and conflict resolution before and after blockchain implementation. The results indicate that with the consensus mechanism in blockchain, the requirements are properly baselined, and the requirement's conflicts are effectively handled. Based on the attained promising results, it is concluded that B-REMOTE significantly reduces the development cost, effort, and time compared to the traditional requirement management frameworks.