Investigating requirements volatility during software development projects : an empirical study
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2007
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Changes to software requirements are inevitable during the development process.
Despite advances in software engineering over the past three decades, requirements
changes are a source of project risk in software development, particularly when
businesses and technologies are evolving rapidly.
This so-called requirements volatility has attracted much attention, but its extent
and consequences are not well understood. The research literature lacks empirical
studies investigating requirements volatility, particularly its underlying causes and
consequences, and there are no effective strategies to deal with the associated
problems throughout software development. We address these issues with a long-term
case study in an industrial software development setting to identify and
characterise the causes of requirements volatility, its impacts on the software
development process, and the strategies used by current system development
practitioners to deal with requirements volatility problems.
We analysed requirements change request data from two software project
releases, and investigated the organisation's handling of requirements changes. Our
data include the change request database, project documents, interviews,
observations, and regular discussions with the key informants from the project
members. We used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research techniques.
We first present a critical review of the literature on requirements volatility
issues, from which an analytic synthesis for a currently lacking comprehensive
coverage of requirements volatility phenomena is derived. The review clarifies the
terms used, the sources and adverse impacts of requirements volatility, and the
strategies available to current software development teams. We also provide a
detailed description of a repeatable research design that researchers and practitioners
could use to conduct similar investigation of requirements volatility in any industry
setting.
We developed requirements change classifications from the change request data.
Project members also classified requirements change requests using a card sorting
technique. The resulting categories play a vital role in the empirical analysis of
several aspects of requirements volatility. Its extent can be characterised by such
classification attributes as the types of change (addition, deletion, and modification),
reasons for change, and change origin. The classification is useful in analysing the
cost of requirements change in terms of rework or effort required. Based on an
empirical analysis using the proposed classification, effective strategies were defined
to match organisational needs. The organisation was able to use these results to
improve its change control process and its change request form, thereby improving
management and reducing the impacts of requirements volatility.
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