MEASURING THE IMPACT OF THE MATURITY OF REQUIREMENT ENGINEERING PROCESS ON THE SOFTWARE PROJECT COST AND SCHEDULE

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.