Abstract:
It is well acknowledged fact that software development is a dynamic process so during the
development of a software project many requirement changes are proposed. These proposed changes
have the potential to affect the software development in different dimensions. Cost and schedule of
the software project are among those major dimensions that are affected by Requirement change.
This research work demonstrates the impact of a requirement change on Cost and estimated schedule
of a software project. Cost in terms of development effort (i.e. total working hours) to implement that
change and variance in schedule in the context of week days that occurs due to the implementation of
change. This empirical study suggests a way to compute the effort and schedule variance with the
help of Regression Equation by performing Correlation and Regression analysis on the change
request data collected from 9 different Software projects of Pakistan Software Industry. This analysis
is based on conceptual model for cost and schedule variance estimation. This research study also
discusses the systematic impact analysis approach to analyze how the impact of a change in
requirement propagates from one phase of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to other phase.
