دانلود رایگان مقاله بررسی سیستماتیک مدیریت تحول در ملزومات

Abstract

Context: Software requirements are often not set in concrete at the start of a software development project; and requirements changes become necessary and sometimes inevitable due to changes in customer requirements and changes in business rules and operating environments; hence, requirements development, which includes requirements changes, is a part of a software process. Previous work has shown that failing to manage software requirements changes well is a main contributor to project failure. Given the importance of the subject, there‟s a plethora of research work that discuss the management of requirements change in various directions, ways and means. An examination of these works suggests that there‟s a room for improvement. Objective: In this paper, we present a systematic review of research in Requirements Change Management (RCM) as reported in the literature. Method: We use a systematic review method to answer four key research questions related to requirements change management. The questions are: (1) What are the causes of requirements changes? (2) What processes are used for requirements change management? (3) What techniques are used for requirements change management? and (4) How do organizations make decisions regarding requirements changes? These questions are aimed at studying the various directions in the field of requirements change management and at providing suggestions for future research work. Results: The four questions were answered; and the strengths and weaknesses of existing techniques for RCM were identified. Conclusions: This paper has provided information about the current state-of-the-art techniques and practices for RCM and the research gaps in existing work. Benefits, risks and difficulties associated with RCM are also made available to software practitioners who will be in a position of making better decisions on activities related to RCM. Better decisions will lead to better planning which will increase the chance of project success.

10. Conclusions and Future Work

It is evident that changes in requirements occur for many reasons and can be caused by multiple stakeholders. Regardless of who or what cause these changes, the need for appropriate management is great due to the undesirable consequences if left unattended. However, through this review, it was discovered that change management is an elusive target to achieve and that there are many ways to tackle it. The main objective of this review was to collate information and techniques related to RCM and critically analyse the functionality of such techniques in managing change. This also led to identifying strengths and limitations of these techniques, which signifies the need to enhance the existing change management approaches. This review is also a guide for future researchers on change management in terms of what major work has been undertaken thus far. In the review, the section on factors that cause change in requirements provides an understanding on how vast and constant these changes can be. There is no one root cause for changes which makes change management a challenging task. Therefore, even with an abundance of research on change management, there is still room for improvement. Given the complexity of changes, it is important to identify the processes in place to manage them. It is clear from the available literature that there is no consensus on how to manage change. In some instances, it is based on the type of organization and the environment and in many cases, it is based on the type of changes. Through the available process steps, three common processes were identified; identification, analysis and cost estimation of change. Significant work has been done in each of these areas and several models that encompass these steps have been developed in an effort to provide a full-scale solution for change management. It is also important to understand that the approaches vary depending on the level of the organisation managing the change.