Managing Requirements Change Research Articles

An AHP-Based Framework for Effective Requirement Management in Agile Software Development (ASD)

In Agile changes may be made at any time throughout the project lifetime in agile projects. These changes, however, often lead to longer turnaround times and higher costs while having a substantial influence on the activities and quality of project management. The suggested framework's main goal is to increase the effectiveness and flexibility of the requirement engineering process by successfully managing requirements changes, particularly in contexts where Agile Software Development (ASD) is practiced. The Agile methodology has gained popularity as a strategy for developing software because it can adjust to changing requirements and deliver software gradually. To make sure that the software being produced satisfies stakeholder expectations and adds value to the firm, good requirement management is essential. Using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to prioritize requirements based on their relative relevance and urgency, this article introduces a framework for requirement management in Agile Projects. The most important requirements are taken care of first thanks to this strategy, which enables a more organized and informed decision-making process. We demonstrate the actual use of our framework in real-world contexts and highlight its efficacy in solving the issues faced by Agile projects by including a case study and an accompanying table. The suggested framework also supports the three core tenets of the Agile approach—transparency, cooperation, and continuous improvement—to foster an environment of excellence and ongoing learning within the Agile team. By developing these fundamental ideas, our framework not only supports Agile teams' continual growth and development but also helps them manage and prioritize requirements more efficiently, which ultimately improves project results and increases organizational value.

Software Requirements Negotiation: A Review on Challenges

Requirements negotiation involves discussion on the requirements conflict to have some compromise that will satisfy the participating stakeholders of a software project. The output of a requirement negotiation is a set of satisfied requirements of two or more parties. In this paper, we present a systematic review of requirements negotiation challenges. The study adopted 34 papers from the final study selection process which were analyzed based on the requirements negotiation challenges they addressed. The identified challenges are decision-making, communication, performance, managing requirement changes, and conflict resolution. The output of the study indicates that decision-making is addressed by 33% of the studies reviewed, followed by the performance with 22%, conflict resolution with 19%, while 16% focus on stakeholders’ communication, and managing requirements changes has 10%.

Success factors influencing requirements change management process in global software development

Abstract Planning and managing requirements changes in Global Software Development (GSD) is a challenging task. While requirements change has received much attention from researchers, Requirements Change Management (RCM) process is still an emerging area in GSD. The objective of this paper is to identify the success factors of RCM in the GSD environment. We applied the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) approach and identified 23 success factors that influence RCM in GSD projects. The findings of the SLR indicate that change impact analysis, change understanding, management support, RCM process awareness, standard for RCM, progress measure, updated requirements and minimize project failure risk are key factors that influence RCM in a GSD project. We present a comparison of success factors identified in client and vendor organizations. Moreover, we present a framework to classify the identified success factors for RCM process implementation. We believe GSD organizations can use the framework to better manage requirements change in GSD projects.

Towards functional change decision support based on COSMIC FSM method

Abstract Context: Managing requirements change is a central issue in the software development industry. In fact, inappropriate decisions about a change request may jeopardize the project development progress by going over budget/time or delivering a software with functional requirements that do not fully meet the user’s needs. Hence, a change decision support is required for the success of the software development. Objective: This paper has a three-fold objective: (i) explore the applicability of the ISO standard COSMIC FSM method to evaluate a change request; (ii) investigate the use of estimation models to predict the effort required to handle a functional change and its impact on the initially estimated software development effort; and (iii) propose a decision support method that offers the appropriate information for the change advisory board members to decide whether to accept, deny or defer a functional change request. Method: To guide the decision on a change request, the method proposed in this paper accounts for the most important factors when evaluating a change request, namely the functional change status, the preference of the change requester, and the effort required to handle the change. The functional change status is identified based on the sensitivity of the changed functionality and the functional size of the functional change. The functional change effort can be estimated using several ways including the COCOMO II model, the Simple Linear Regression Model and expert judgment. Furthermore, this paper proposes a prototype to determine automatically the functional change status and offers pertinent information that the change advisory board can use to determine how to handle a change request. The use of the decision support method and tool is illustrated through three case studies. Results: A decision support method to help decision-makers respond to a functional change request is provided. This method takes into account the functional change status, the preference of the change requester and the functional change effort. The empirical evaluation of the proposed method is illustrated through three case studies. The role of experiments here is primarily to provide a proof-of-concept rather than an exhaustive evaluation. Conclusion: Using COSMIC FSM method, it is possible to identify functional changes leading to a potential impact on the software development progress. Based on the evaluation of the functional change, the change advisory board members can make judicious decisions about whether to accept, defer or deny a functional change request.

Managing software requirements changes through change specification and classification

Software requirements changes are often inevitable due to the changing nature of running a business and operating the Information Technology (IT) system which supports the business. As such, managing software requirements changes is an important part of software development. Past research has shown that failing to manage software requirements changes effectively is a main contributor to project failure. One of the difficulties in managing requirements changes is the lack of effective methods for communicating changes from the business to the IT professionals. In this paper, we present an approach to managing requirements change by improving the change communication and elicitation through a method of change specification and a method of classification. Change specification provides a way such that communication ambiguities can be avoided between business and IT staff. The change classification mechanism identifies the type of the changes to be made and preliminary identification of the actions to be taken. We illustrate the usefulness of the methods by applying them to a case study of course management system.

A supporting tool for requirements change management in distributed agile development

Software development industry has witnessed the growth of the agile movement and approaches. Applying the agile approaches and practices in the distributed environment will lead to gain a lot of benefits such as reduced costs, higher efficiency and better customization, on the other hand it will face many challenges for example working in different time zones, requirements changes, personal selection and knowledge management. In order to gain these benefits, it should address the challenges that will face the agile approaches in a distributed environment. One of the main challenges is managing the requirements changes during the process of distributed agile software development. Only few researches published in the literature, addressed the problem of requirements changes during the development process in distributed agile development. Most of the published researches in this context are based on industrial experiences which increases the need for combining the industry with academia within this area. In this paper an approach to manage requirements changes in distributed agile development is introduced. This suggested approach works to fill the gap between the industry and research in distributed agile development by combining the industrial practice and academic technique. This approach is based on a proposed feature model called a features tree. The approach is associated with a supporting software tool that helps to manage the requirement changes in distributed agile development. The supporting tool is tested and evaluated in real environments by software development professionals using an exhaustive set of criteria, and the results are promising.

Towards Implementation of Requirements Management Specific Practices (SP1.3 and SP1.4) for Saudi Arabian Small and Medium Sized Software Development Organizations

There is a significant need to give careful consideration to Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) Level 2 specific practices—SP 1.3 “manage requirements changes,” and SP 1.4 “maintain bidirectional traceability of requirements,” especially in the context of small- and medium-sized software development organizations in Saudi Arabia, in order to assist such organizations in getting one step closer to achieving CMMI Level 2 certification. The objective of this research is to implement CMMI Level 2 specific practices—SP 1.3 and SP 1.4. In this paper, a workflow model for each specific practice has been developed. In addition, initial evaluation of the models has been discussed. It is necessary to highlight that this paper contributes not only to the implementation of SP 1.3 and SP 1.4 of Requirements management process area in the context of small- and medium-sized software development organizations but also to the body of empirical studies in various context. Data has been collected by exploring published research articles and high-level software process descriptions. Moreover, previous research works that dealt with the implementation of CMMI Level 2 process areas have been reviewed. Furthermore, research articles that provide guidance to software development organizations for implementing process areas of CMMI Level 2 in their environments have been considered. After careful analysis of the collected data, we have proposed the models for two specific practices of CMMI level 2, i.e., managing requirements change and maintaining bidirectional traceability of requirements. Each model is divided into core stages, and different activities associated with each stage are clearly indicated. Initial evaluation of the proposed models was also conducted using the expert review process. Based on the initial evaluation, we are confident that our proposed models are clear and easy to learn, follow, and use. Moreover, our models are applicable to small- and medium-sized software development organizations in Saudi Arabia. The proposed models can also assist such organizations in implementing these two specific practices. For further evaluation, we need to perform multiple case studies in an industrial setting to test the proposed models.

A method of requirements change management for global software development

Context: Requirements change is an inevitable software development activity and can occur due to changes in user requirements, increased understanding of the stakeholders’ needs, customer organizational re-structure, and availability of new technologies. Timely management of these changes is vital to successful software development, which can be achieved through a rigorous requirements change management (RCM) process. RCM is not straight forward in collocated software development; and with the presences of geographical, social, cultural and temporal factors in Global Software Development (GSD), it makes RCM even more difficult for GSD. Existing RCM methods do not take into consideration of the GSD issues. Objective: In this paper, we present a method for managing requirements changes for GSD. Method: Our method consists of three stages: (i) an understanding of the changes required between different GSD sites is to be established; (ii) a change analysis is to be performed with respect to the development work, which might be either directly or indirectly affected by the changes; and (iii) a finalization of the changes will be made between GSD sites. Past researchers used student groups in a university environment to play the roles of stakeholders in experiments in GSD studies. We validate our method by applying it to a case study of an online shopping system, where the roles of stakeholders were played by a group of students. Results: The results showed that our method facilitates stakeholders to manage requirements changes for GSD better than the existing methods could. Conclusion: Managing changes in requirements at the right time improves the chance of developing a GSD project successfully by minimizing the risks associated with it.

Scrum Requirements Engineering Practices and Challenges in Offshore Software Development

Engineering is one of the hardest tasks in developing a software system. Reports state that incomplete requirements are the third most important factor for project failure. Today more and more companies are embracing agile methods to develop software. As light weight methods, agile methods have their own requirements engineering practices which are in contrast to traditional requirements engineering practices. Scrum is a widely used agile method in Sri Lanka, a country where a lot of offshore software development is beingcarried out. This study investigated the level of scrum requirements engineering practices adopted in Sri Lanka and the challenges introduced by these practices. This research wasconducted using qualitative methods. Respondents who play different job roles from nine organizations were interviewed in order to collect data. Majority of the respondents successfully practices the scrum RE practices, face to face communication, requirements prioritization, iterative requirements engineering and managing requirements change. Some organizations were not comfortable with the test driven development. The main issue with offshore development is achieving continuous customer involvement and interaction throughout the project. As agile methods rely on customer involvement more than any other development methodology, this might have a bad influence on the project.

An Improved Framework for Managing Requirements Changes

The management of requirements changes is an important task in requirement engineering, and the request for changing requirements occurs after the establishment of the requirements specification should be handled more charily. The logic-based techniques have attracted great attention, Ke-Dian Mu and others adopted the negotiation-style revision proposed by Booth to manage the requirements changes effectively. Based on Mu’s work, this paper improves the method of equivalence classes division, and proposes the “4 equivalence classes” division method, which improved the negotiation efficiency to some extent, perfected the original framework.

Managing software requirements changes based on negotiation-style revision

For any proposed software project, when the software requirements specification has been established, requirements changes may result in not only a modification of the requirements specification but also a series of modifications of all existing artifacts during the development. Then it is necessary to provide effective and flexible requirements changes management. In this paper, we present an approach to managing requirements changes based on Booth's negotiation-style framework for belief revision. Informally, we consider the current requirements specification as a belief set about the system-to-be. The request of requirements change is viewed as new information about the same system-to-be. Then the process of executing the requirements change is a process of revising beliefs about the system-to-be. We design a family of belief negotiation models appropriate for different processes of requirements revision, including the setting of the request of requirements change being fully accepted, the setting of the current requirements specification being fully preserved, and that of the current specification and the request of requirements change reaching a compromise. In particular, the prioritization of requirements plays an important role in reaching an agreement in each belief negotiation model designed in this paper.

Change impact analysis with a goal-driven traceability-based approach

Recently, the growing popularity of requirements engineering attracts an increasing attention on requirements traceability and change impact analysis, which also imposes a great demand for a systematic approach in developing software systems to handling traceability relations and requirements changes in an automatic manner. In this work, a goal-driven requirements traceability approach is proposed to develop and manage requirements changes along three dimensions: (1) to develop software and manage requirements based on the goal-driven use case (GDUC) approach, (2) to establish and maintain the traceability relation with a design structure matrix (DSM) to derive the traceability tree, and (3) to analyze requirements change impacts through the partitioning of DSM into blocks to serve as a basis for calculating use case points. The proposed approach is illustrated by a benchmark problem domain of a meeting scheduler system. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The impact of requirements changes on specifications and state machines

AbstractRequirements change both during and after a phase of development for a variety of reasons, including error correction and feature changes. Requirements change management is one of the most complex and difficult problems to deal with in requirements elicitation and tracking. It is generally not understood how a specific change propagates through the specification and into the code. In this paper we capture requirements changes as series of atomic changes in specifications. Using a rigorous specification method called sequence‐based specification, we propose a set of algorithms for managing all possible atomic requirements changes. The algorithms have been formulated within an axiom system for sequence‐based specification and proven for correctness. They have also been implemented in a prototype tool with which users are able to push requirements changes through to changes in specifications, maintain old specifications over time and evolve them into new specifications with the least amount of human interaction and rework. The approach of utilizing state machines to model and manage requirements changes guarantees strong evidence about the correctness and completeness of the proposed theory that will lead to more reliable software in the presence of change, especially with embedded systems and safety‐critical systems. The solution described is general enough for adoption by software and system developers, and well suited for incremental development. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Pushing requirements changes through to changes in specifications

Requirements changes can occur both during and after a phase of development for a variety of reasons, including error correction and feature changes. It is difficult and intensive work to integrate requirements changes made after specification is completed. Sequence-based specification was developed to convert ordinary functional software requirements into complete, consistent, and traceably correct specifications through a constructive process. Algorithms for managing requirements changes meet a very great need in field application of the sequence-based specification method. In this paper we propose to capture requirements changes as a series of atomic changes in specifications, and present polynomial-time algorithms for managing these changes. The algorithms are built into the tool support with which users are able to push requirements changes through to changes in specifications, maintain old specifications over time and evolve them into new specifications with the least amount of human interaction and rework. All our change algorithms are supported by rigorous mathematical formulation and proof of correctness. The application example is a safe controller.