Building a Case for a Dynamic Requirements Process Improvement Model

Software requirements management is a volatile and dynamic process that requires continuous requirements process improvement in order to arrive at adequate requirements. However, there is interdependence amongst the processes themselves that leads to requirements managers‘ inability to achieve satisficed requirements for the intended software system. As a result, several software projects have either a cost, schedule and quality creep or a mixture of them due to poor requirements process improvement (RPI) management. Currently, no attempt has been made to model the impact of the relationships amongst requirements processes to help gain problem understanding while using highly visualized tools. This has been cited by several authors as the reason why the attainment of a satisficed state for the requirement engineering processes cannot be achieved. This research is an attempt to develop a generic model for RPI by triangulating System Dynamics (SD) and Statistical Process Control (SPC) that exploits SD‘s ability to analyze dynamic complex systems and SPC‘s highly visualizable time series analyses to achieve satisficed system.