Abstract
Requirement volatility is a common and inevitable project risk which has severe consequences on software projects. When requirement change occurs, a project manager wants to analyze its impact so as to better cope with it. As the modification to one requirement can cause changes in its dependent requirements and its dependency relationship, the impact analysis can be very complex. This paper proposes a simulation approach DepRVSim (Requirement Volatility Simulation considering Dependency relationship) to assessing this sort of impact. We abstract the general patterns of the influence mechanism, which may trigger modification in its dependency relationship and bring changes in other requirements through dependency. DepRVSim can generate such information as the probability distribution of effort deviation and schedule deviation. As a proof-of-concept, the applicability of DepRVSim is demonstrated with an illustrative case study of a real software project. Results indicate that DepRVSim is able to provide experimental evidence for decision making when requirement changes.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Boehm, B.W.: Software Risk Management: Principles and Practices. IEEE Software 8(1), 32–41 (1991)
Kotonys, G., Sommerville, I.: Requirements Engineering Process & Techniques. John Wiley & Sons (2002)
Houston, D.X., Mackulak, G.T., Collofello, J.S.: Stochastic simulation of risk factor potential effects for software development risk management. JSS 59(3), 247–257 (2001)
Dahlstedt, Å., Persson, A.: Requirements interdependencies - Moulding the State of Research into a Research Agenda. In: The Ninth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ 2003), Klagenfurt/Velden, Austria, pp. 71–80 (2003)
Wohlin, C., Aurum, A.: What is important when deciding to include a software requirement in a project or a release? In: Fourth International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, Noosa Heads, Australia, November 17–18 (2005)
Pfahl, D., Lebsanft, K.: Using Simulation to Analyze the Impact of Software Requirements Volatility on Project Performance. Information and Software Technology 42(14), 1001–1008 (2000)
Ferreira, S., Collofello, S.J., Shunk, D., Mackulak, G.: Understanding the Effects of Requirements Volatility in Software Engineering by Using Analytical Modeling and Software Process Simulation. The Journal of Systems and Software 82, 1568–1577 (2009)
Zhang, H., Kitchenham, B., Pfahl, D.: Software Process Simulation Modeling: An Extended Systematic Review. In: Münch, J., Yang, Y., Schäfer, W. (eds.) ICSP 2010. LNCS, vol. 6195, pp. 309–320. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Liu, D., Wang, Q., Xiao, J., Li, J., Li, H.: RVSim: A Simulation Approach to Predict the Impact of Requirements Volatility on Software Project Plans. In: Wang, Q., Pfahl, D., Raffo, D.M. (eds.) ICSP 2008. LNCS, vol. 5007, pp. 307–319. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Stark, G., Skillicorn, A., Ameele, R.: An Examination of the Effects of Requirements Changes on Software Releases. CROSSTALK. The Journal of Defense Software Engineering, 11–16 (December 1998)
Al-Emran, A., Pfahl, D., Ruhe, G.: Decision Support for Product Release Planning based on Robustness Analysis. In: Proc. IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE ), pp. 157–166 (2010)
Ramesh, B., Jarke, M.: Toward Reference Models for Requirements Traceability. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 27(1), 58–93 (2001)
Robinson, W.N., Pawlowski, S.D., Volkov, V.: Requirements Interaction Management, GSU CIS Working Paper 99-7, Department of Computer Information Systems, Georgia State of University, Atlanta (1999)
Dahlstedt, A.G., Persson, A.: Requirements Interdependencies - Moulding the State of Research into a Research Agenda. In: Ninth International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality in Conjunction with CAiSE 2003 (2003)
Gotel, O., Finkelstein, A.: An Analysis of the Requirements Traceability Problem. In: Proc. IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 1994), pp. 94–101 (1994)
Nurmuliani, N., Zowghi, D., Powell, S.: Analysis of Requirements Volatility During Software Development Life Cycle. In: Proceedings of the 2004 Australian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC 2004), Melbourne, Australia (2004)
Nurmuliani, N., Zowghi, D., Williams, S.P.: Characterising Requirements Volatility: An Empirical Analysis. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE 2005), Noosa, Australia (2005)
Abdel-Hamid, T.K., Madnick, S.E.: Software Projects Dynamics – an Integrated Approach. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs (1991)
Bandinelli, S., Fuggetta, A., Lavazza, L., Loi, M., Picco, G.P.: Modeling and Improving an Industrial Software Process. IEEE Trans. on Soft. Eng. 21(5), 440–453 (1995)
Gruhn, V., Saalmann, A.: Software Process Validation Based on FUNSOFT Nets. In: Derniame, J.-C. (ed.) EWSPT 1992. LNCS, vol. 635, pp. 223–226. Springer, Heidelberg (1992)
Kellner, M.I., Hansen, G.A.: Software Process Modeling: A Case Study. In: Proc. AHICSS 1989, vol. II - Software Track, pp. 175–188 (1989)
Mi, P., Scacchi, W.: A knowledge-based environment for modeling and simulating software engineering processes. IEEE Trans. on Know. and Data Eng. 2(3), 283–294 (1990)
Kellner, M.I., Madachy, R.J., Raffo, D.M.: Software process simulation modeling: Why? What? How? The Journal of Systems and Software 46(2/3), 91–105 (1999)
Zowghi, D., Offen, R., Nurmuliani, N.: The Impact of Requirements Volatility on the Software Development Lifecycle. In: Proc. International Conference on Software Theory and Practice (IFIP World Computer Congress) (2000)
Zowghi, D., Nurmuliani, N.: A Study of the Impact of Requirements Volatility on Software Project Performance. In: Proc. Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2002), Gold Coast, Australia, pp. 3–11 (2002)
Malaiya, Y.K., Denton, J.: Requirements Volatility and Defect Density. In: Proc. International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 1999 ), pp. 285–294 (1999)
Nurmuliani, N., Zowghi, D., Williams, S.: Requirements Volatility and Its Impact on Change Effort: Evidence Based Research in Software Development Projects. In: Proc. Australian Workshop on Requirements Engineering (AWRE 2006), Adelaide, Australia (2006)
Ferreira, S., Collofello, J., Shunk, D., Mackulak, G., Wolfe, P.: Utilization of Process Modeling and Simulation in Understanding the Effects of requirements volatility in Software Development. In: International Workshop on software process Simulation and Modeling (proSim 2003), Portland, Oregon, USA, May 3-4 (2003)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Wang, J., Li, J., Wang, Q., Zhang, H., Wang, H. (2012). A Simulation Approach for Impact Analysis of Requirement Volatility Considering Dependency Change. In: Regnell, B., Damian, D. (eds) Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality. REFSQ 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7195. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28714-5_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28714-5_6
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28713-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28714-5
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)