Abstract:
Investigating the factors that drive requirements
change is an important prerequisite for understanding
the nature of requirements volatility. This increased
understanding will improve the process of
requirements change management.
This paper mainly focuses on change analysis to
identify and characterize the causes of requirements
volatility. We apply a causal analysis method on
change request data to develop a taxonomy of change.
This taxonomy allows us to identify and trace the
problems, reasons and sources of changes. Adopting
an industrial case study approach, our findings reveal
that the main causes of requirements volatility were
changes in customer needs (or market demands),
developers’ increased understanding of the products,
and changes in the organization policy. During the
development process, we also examined the extent of
requirements volatility and discovered that the rate of
volatility was high at the time of requirements
specification completion and while functional
specification reviews were conducted.
