The Impact of Software Requirement Change – A Review

Abeer AlSanad and Azeddine Chikh

College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Abstract. One of the main recommended practices to enhance software

development process is dealing with requirement change. It represents risks to
the success and completion of a project. In this paper a comprehensive review
on the impact of Software Requirement Change has been conducted. The
literature was written in a historical way and divided into four periods. The
results of this review show that most addressed fields in this topic studied the
requirement change impact on the time (schedule) and the cost of the software
project. Furthermore open research directions in this field are proposed.

Keywords: Software requirement engineering, Requirement Change,

Requirement Change Management, Requirements Volatility.

1 Introduction

The last decade has captivated significant attention paid to requirements engineering
by many interested people because they believe that good requirements is a main
condition to a software success [1]. Once the requirements are clearly set, developers
start the other technical works: system design, development, testing, implementation,
and operation [2]. Although there is a high attention to collect software requirement
specification completely, the requirements are certainly prone to change throughout
system development [3]. This work focuses specifically on the impact of software
requirements change. Requirements Change (RC) is defined by Hussain in [4] as
“the emergence of new requirements or the modification or removal of existing
requirements”.
The main objective of this paper is to study the RC literature. The remainder of the
paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the motivation behind this research
work. Section 3 studies the impact of Software Requirement Change in literature.
Section 4 contains discussion and results of the work. Finally, Section 5 concludes the
work and provides some open research directions.

2 Motivation

Realizing the impact of RC on the development of software is highly encouraging us

to study that impact and provide a state of art on this topic. Nurmuliani et. al. in [5]
stated that RC is considered as a major source of risk because it will increase the
budget overruns or schedule delays. Nurmuliani et. al. in [6] said that 86% of the

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 803

Á. Rocha et al. (eds.), New Contributions in Information Systems and Technologies,
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 353, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-16486-1_80
804 A. AlSanad and A. Chikh

change requests are related to RC. Kotonya and Sommerville in [7] claimed that it is
often more than 50% of the requirements are changed before the completion of a
software project. Moreover, Boehm and Barry in [8] notified that implementing the
RCs in later phases causes 200 times more cost than implementing the RCs in
analysis phase. All these previous facts are the primary motivation to accomplish this
work.

3 Impact of Software Requirement Change – A Literature

Review

In this review, the literature was written in a historical way that studies each period of
time separately to determine to which direction the trend in this field is going. The
research works range from 1972 until 2014 and are divided into four periods as shown
in Fig 1. Each period has its own general nature.

RC
Literature

Analyzing the Discovering Reducing the

The initiation RC the impact impact

Fig. 1. RC literature periods

3.1 1972 – 1999: The Initiation

The first work, published on the impact of RC, was in 1972. After this year, the
greatest part of the works is concentrated on discovering the sources of RC like in [9]
and [10].
In 1972, Haney in [11] discussed the problem of rippling changes in large systems
and proposed a simple model to study the effect of that changes. This model is
worked on estimating the number of changes and a strategy to release a system to
keep it stable. This Haney’s work considers as the first paper published on RC impact
analysis.
In 1983, Boehm in [9] gives in his paper a state of art of software engineering
economics at that time. It addressed the economic analysis techniques and how they
applied in software engineering and management. Boehm gave a side of his paper to
the management of RC and its impact on the cost of the whole software development