Using early stage project data to predict change-proneness

Several previous studies have suggested methods for predicting change-proneness based on software complexity metrics. We hypothesise that data from the early stages of a development project such as requirements and design could also be used to make such predictions. We define here a set of new metrics to capture data from the requirements and/or design stages, and derive values for these metrics using a case study project. We do find that significant differences in change-proneness can be detected between components with high or with low values for our metrics, suggesting that this is an area which would benefit from further study.