Software systems are critical assets to organisations as they support important business processes and workflow. To maintain the value of these assets, the requirements of software systems must evolve whenever there are changes in business needs. A key problem to organisations is implementing requirements change to the existing software systems. Such initiatives need proper analyses so that their effects could be determined before resources are spent. Impact analysis is therefore an important step in requirements change management. As a project, any change implementation involves risks. It is thus necessary for impact analysis to consider risk factors for implementing requirements change. However to date, the risk factors concerning requirement change are not much explored. This paper aims to identify the risk factors for implementing requirements change. The risk factors were identified through two qualitative approaches, namely a review of related work and a focus group study. The former involved fifty published articles and the latter concerned five domain experts. The collected risk factors from both studies were analysed by using content analysis. The risk factors form a risk model for analysing impacts of implementing requirements change. The model helps practitioners to assess the viability of requirements change requests.
Requirements change has been regarded as a substantial risk in software development projects. The factors that contribute to the risk are identified through impact analysis, which later determine the planning of the change implementation. The analysis is however not straightforward as the risk factors that constitute requirements change implementation is currently not much explored. This paper identifies the risk factors by firstly collating them qualitatively through a review of related work and a focus group study. The factors are then confirmed quantitatively through a survey in which data is analysed by using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM). The survey comprise of 276 practitioners from software industry who are involved in the impact analysis. The results indicate that User, Project Team, Top Management, Third Party, Organisation, Identification of Change, Existing Product and Planning of Change Implementation are the significant risk factors in planning of requirements change implementation.
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