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A method of requirements change analysis

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Abstract

Software requirements are often not set in concrete at the start of a software development project; and requirement changes become necessary and sometimes inevitable due to changes in customer requirements and changes in business rules and operating environment; hence, requirements development, which includes requirements changes, is a part of a software process. Previous research reports that correcting requirements errors late costs many times more than correcting them during the requirements development phase. There is, hence, a need to manage them well and to analyse them in order to identify the impacts, difficulties and potential conflicts with existing requirements. Most studies on requirements change analysis are done at the source code level while paying less attention to the initiation of changes at a higher level. In this paper, we present a method of requirements change analysis based on the changes themselves which are initiated at higher levels. This method consists of three steps: namely (1) analysing the change using functions, (2) identifying the change difficulty and (3) identifying the dependencies using a matrix. We illustrate the usefulness of our method by applying it to a course management system of a university.

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Notes

  1. We point out that requirements changes may also be prioritised by client need; however, for the purpose of this work, we assume we are dealing with changes of nominally equal to client priority. In practice, the results of the analysis of the type described here may be used to influence client priorities.

  2. Please refer to [16]. S. Jayatilleke and R. Lai, “A Method of Specifying and Classifying Requirements Change”, in Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC), 2013 22nd Australian, 2013, pp. 175–180. for full details of the specification and classification method.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Information Technology, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, 3083, Australia

    Shalinka Jayatilleke, Richard Lai & Karl Reed

Authors
  1. Shalinka Jayatilleke
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  2. Richard Lai
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  3. Karl Reed
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Correspondence to Richard Lai.

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Jayatilleke, S., Lai, R. & Reed, K. A method of requirements change analysis. Requirements Eng 23, 493–508 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-017-0277-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-017-0277-7

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