Requirements change: a dissection of management issues

Abstract

Increasingly, customers expect modern software systems to be evolvable and sufficiently flexible to accommodate changing users needs. This expectation, however, is untempered by the fact that changing requirements are recognised as a major cause of project failure, and over time, can have a degrading effect on the underlying design of a system. There is a need therefore, for organisations to develop best practices for managing requirements change. This paper provides an analysis of core issues in the management of requirements change, e.g. requirements identification, impact analysis, change prioritisation and change measurement. For each issue, we describe the (a) goal to be achieved, (b) failure mode to avoid, (c) management strategies to adopt, and (d) metrics that support the management strategy. The paper contributes practical guidance on managing requirements change that is independent of application domain and specification notations.