A Risk Model of Requirements Change Impact Analysis

Software systems are critical assets to organisations as they support important business processes and workflow. To maintain the value of these assets, the requirements of software systems must evolve whenever there are changes in business needs. A key problem to organisations is implementing requirements change to the existing software systems. Such initiatives need proper analyses so that their effects could be determined before resources are spent. Impact analysis is therefore an important step in requirements change management. As a project, any change implementation involves risks. It is thus necessary for impact analysis to consider risk factors for implementing requirements change. However to date, the risk factors concerning requirement change are not much explored. This paper aims to identify the risk factors for implementing requirements change. The risk factors were identified through two qualitative approaches, namely a review of related work and a focus group study. The former involved fifty published articles and the latter concerned five domain experts. The collected risk factors from both studies were analysed by using content analysis. The risk factors form a risk model for analysing impacts of implementing requirements change. The model helps practitioners to assess the viability of requirements change requests.