A Method of Specifying and Classifying Requirements Change

Change is one aspect of business that is inevitable. The volatile nature of business requirements is considered one of the main contributors to information technology project failure. One of the key reasons for difficulty in managing change is the lack of adequate methods to communicate change from business to the IT department. In this paper, we present an approach to support change communication and elicitation through a change specification and classification method. The specification framework is based on an onto-terminological concept which is a combination of both ontology and terminology. It is constructed using an abstraction of the Goal Question Metrics representing the linguistic function (terminology) whilst an abstraction of the Resource Description Framework (representing ontology) is used to elaborate the logical connection of the terms. Through this approach, we are able to describe requirements change using clear guidelines and also provide a common communication medium for both IT and business people.