A Change Impact Size Estimation Approach during the Software Development

Modern software development is iterative and encourages frequent interactions between the software development team and the stakeholders of the software. These interactions will generate change requests as the requirements gradually evolve to meet the stakeholders expectations or due sudden shifts in circumstances. However, during the development, software developers have to assess the impact of these change requests with respect to incomplete status of software artefacts. This situation presents one important aspect when considering a change request, which is how to estimate the size of change impact that is required by a requirement change, given inconsistent states of artefacts across the project. Therefore, this paper introduces a new Change Impact Size Estimation (CISE) approach for the software development phase. Further on that, a prototype tool has been developed to support the implementation of the approach and evaluation. The case study method used for evaluating this approach corroborated the functionality and accuracy of this approach for estimating the change impact size.