1 / 2018-11-09 06:12:09

Empirical Studies to the Prediction and Prevention Model of Requirements Change driven by the Improvement of Project Teams

Change cause; Prediction; Prevention; Emotional Factor; Questionnaire; Interview; Strategy

Considered to be a crucial factor that affected the success rate of software, volatility in requirements could not be avoided in software development. Although agile method that suggested to embrace changes had been popular, voluminous and multi-faceted literature had focused on requirements change, its side effects still greatly challenged software industries. The theory of managing requirements change was not complete, it still needed to be developed in many aspects such as the methods of effectively predicting and preventing requirements change. Current literature attached much more importance to its technical facets, less concerned the combination of human and technology, few studies paid attention to the prediction and prevention methods of changes from the sociotechnical viewpoint. This paper focused on the establishment of prediction and prevention mechanism of requirements changes based on the theoretical analysis about change causes by stressing both the human role and technical level, and two case studies(questionnaire and interview) were conducted to back up the arguments of this study. The results of online questionnaire was analyzed by frequency statistics to explain the significance of human factors including the emotional characteristics of developers. The result of the interview revealed a model 3P+2C that could well qualitatively illustrate the necessity and importance of effectively construct and manage project teams in decreasing the change rate of requirements and enhancing the software success rate. This paper on the one hand disclosed the significant human factors and emotional characteristics of developers that would affect the success rate of software, on the other hand established a prediction and prevention model PPMRC based on the improvement of project teams which was validated by the model 3P+2C. This study would help the researchers to uncover the critical areas of comprehensive and practical prediction and prevention method of requirements change that many researchers were not able to explore. In the end of this paper, following the conclusion was three practical issues around PPMRC that suggested researchers for further investigation.