Indicating Potential Risks for Project Success Based on Requirements Fulfillment

Requirements Engineering (RE) contains many different practices to elicit, communicate and document customer requirements. Developers need to understand these requirements properly in order to achieve project success by fulfilling them [1]. A prerequisite for developers’ understanding of relevant requirements and their meaning is successful requirements communication [2]. Therefore, the selected RE practice is related with project success by influencing requirements communication which is important for understanding and fulfilling requirements. Beneficial RE supports requirements communication and thus requirements fulfillment respectively project success. In this context, requirements compliance is one possible measure of project success, since its core message is: Fulfill all customer requirements, but build nothing else [3]. It represents the accuracy of implemented compared to customer requirements. This enables a measurable relation between RE practice and project success based on requirements fulfillment, which allows assessing the quality of RE activities. We analyzed requirements compliance in three student software projects at each review date. Our results show that requirements compliance can indicate potential risks for project success based on requirements fulfillment and thus customer satisfaction.