Towards Requirements Change Decision Support

Our experiences with industrial software development projects have often revealed that requirements change even after their formal approvals. Although the requirements are never stable, proactive identification of potentially changeable or deferrable requirements, and estimation of their impacts early in a project can be useful in minimizing the risks and cost overruns. In practice, the decisions to change or defer certain requirements are based on experience, and are mostly driven by business needs and product release timelines. There are no techniques available which could foresee such changes early in the project. In this work, we perform exploratory analysis of the requirement artifacts from thirty three industrial software development projects and shared our observations on different requirement change attributes. Through empirical analysis, we evolve the relative weights of each of these attributes in terms of their impacts on the project schedule and effort. Based on the analysis, a model is developed to predict the impact due to requirement changes and it is validated. This model can be used to develop a requirement change decision support tool to assist decision makers.