Requirement changes and cascading effects of change propagation are major sources of inefficiencies in product development and increase the risk of project failure. Risk management regarding these requirement changes yields the potential to handle such changes efficiently. Currently unlocked, a systematic approach is required for risk management to assess the risk of a requirement change with appropriate effort in industrial application. Within the paper at hand, a novel method for systematic assessment of requirement change risk is presented. It is developed in a multiple case study approach with three product development projects from different industrial branches. The change risk is assessed by combining change likelihood and change impact. Propagation effects are considered by analyzing requirement interrelations. To limit application effort, a tailorable approach towards assessment of change causes based on generalized influence factors and a pre-defined rule set for semi-automatized assessment of requirements interrelations is used. A software prototype is developed and implemented to enable evaluation and transfer to industrial application. The approach is evaluated using a combination of case study projects, stakeholder workshops, questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Applying the method, the risks of requirement changes are assessed systematically, and subsequent risk management is enabled. The contribution at hand opens up the research space of risk management in handling requirement changes which is currently almost unexploited. At the same time, it enables more efficient product development.

Changing requirements have a broad impact on product development processes. In this paper, a novel approach towards structuring requirements is proposed. Based on a requirements list, interrelations of requirements are assessed semi-automatically by a rule basis. Here, generic interrelations funded on either physical fundamentals or working principles are recorded. By this approach, requirements structure matrices are derived semi-automatically. Combined with selecting critical requirements based on structured criterions, iterations due to changing requirements will be reduced.

Complexity of products and systems is increasing through digitalization, interdisciplinarity as well as high technology maturity and new business models. In consequence, new product development (NPD) projects need to manage and satisfy a large number of requirements from a broad range of stakeholders. Yet, NPD projects are often delayed due to requirement changes. In this paper, a new method for analyzing requirement change propagation is presented. The method is based on the assessment of requirement interrelations structured in a requirements structure matrix by a modified page-rank algorithm. By the method, a high number of strongly interrelated requirements can be analyzed in an efficient manner. Additionally, higher-level interrelations as well as the relative weights of requirements are also incorporated in the analysis. Hereby, an efficient holistic approach towards the analysis of requirement change propagation is proposed.

Many development projects of complex, interdisciplinary products fail due to an inefficient handling of requirement changes. One reason for this is that requirement dependencies and the resulting change propagation are not sufficiently recognized and considered by existing approaches. Based on a literature study and two industry workshops, approaches of automated dependency analysis of requirements for interdisciplinary development are evaluated. The result is that ontology-based approaches are particularly suitable for the automated dependency analysis of requirements due to the use of expert knowledge and the possibility of automation. On this basis, subsequent research activities can further develop the handling of requirements changes in interdisciplinary projects in a targeted manner.

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