Software Requirements Change Management Research And Practice

According to a survey by McKinley Corporation, only 16% of software projects succeed to finish on schedule globally. There are various factors contributing to the failures, such as changing requirements, ability to conduct good communication, and management methodology. Ineffective control of changing requirements is one of the major factors. Therefore, to have a successful project, you need to have an efficient system with processes and methodologies to achieve good control of requirements changes.This treatise aims to analyze changing requirements during software development and maintenance. With a thorough study on UCM model from Rational Corporation, and armed with her industrial practice and experience, the author extended from UCM the part on requirements change evaluation and process flow management. In particular, the author proposes to take into account of change management in every aspect of project management, and evaluate punitively its affects on all relevant parts of project management process. These form a basis for a novel method proposed in this treatise called OUCM. The author also provides some best practices on the application of this theory in real world.Based on "Flaw percolation model", this treatise develops a model of "evaluating qualitative effects due to project requirement changes". This model describes the impact to project workload due to requirement changes in varying phases of project development cycles. This mode provides a clear and unified view to project managements with respect to changes on project cost and workload due to project requirement changes.The key proposal from this treatise is in put forward a method of managing project requirement changes called Optimized Unified Change Management (OUCM). It is inspired from a theory called Unified Change Management (UCM) developed by Rational cooperation. To handle requirement changes, OUCM consists of two workflows (requirement change application and resource allocation management flow), a software process (change oriented process), and a common measure that adapts to these changes. The changes affect requirement analysis, design methods and development languages. OUCM takes every requirement change as a new requirement. These requirement changes will be accumulated during "pause" phase, and once a new cycle starts, these changes will be evaluated and introduced back into process so that plan, design and activities of projects will all be adjusted accordingly. Henceforth, OUCM proposes a method that isolates project development from real-world, inherently random changes. This will help ensure a normal project development flow uninterrupted by daily changes, which in turn avoids or reduces the creeping of cost and workload due to project requirement changes.