A Systematic Approach for Identifying Requirement Change Management Challenges
Sajid Anwer, Lian Wen, Zhe Wang · 2019
Requirement Change is one of the most challenging tasks in software development lifecycle, particularly in the complex context of Global Software Development (GSD). During the last decade, many studies are carried out to address these problems, however, careful examination of these works suggests that there's a potential research gap. This paper has performed a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) to identify the most significant/commonly studied challenges of requirement change management process and furthermore this process under GSD context. We identified ten challenges such as impact analysis, cost estimation, artifacts documents management, requirement traceability, requirements dependency, conflicts with existing requirements, time estimation, change prioritization, user involvement, and system destabilizing. Furthermore, three challenges such as communication and coordination, knowledge sharing, management, and Change Control Board (CCB) management are identified for globally distributed projects. We also mapped these identified challenges to Requirement Change Management Process (RCMP) outcomes proposed in our previous study. We believe that mapping between RCM challenges and RCMP outcomes will enhance the practical significance of this study results. Considering the systematic literature review results, we suggest that there is a need to develop a framework for requirement change management for quality software systems development.