Comparative analysis of requirements elaboration of an industrial product

Requirements for a software development project are gradually refined as more information becomes available. This process of requirements elaboration can be quantified using the appropriate set of metrics. This paper reports the results of an empirical study conducted to analyze the requirements elaboration of an industrial software process management tool-SoftPM-being used by more than 300 Chinese commercial software organizations. After adjusting for the effects of overlaps amongst different versions of SoftPM, multi-level requirements data are gathered and elaboration factors for each version are obtained. These elaboration data are compared with the data from a previous empirical study that analyzed requirements elaboration of a set of different small e-services projects. This comparison reveals that the elaboration factors of different SoftPM versions have much less variation confirming the intuition that projects with similar characteristics have comparable elaboration factors.