A study to investigate the impact of requirements instability on software defects

Abstract

Software development is a dynamic process and is characterized by change. Software projects often begin with unclear, ambiguous, and incomplete requirements which give rise to intrinsic volatility. Constant change in requirements is one of the main causes of software defects and a major issue faced by the software industry. This paper describes the findings of our research-based study that investigates the impact of both the pre-release and post-release requirements changes on overall defects by defining measures, collecting data against those measures and analyzing the collected data through statistical techniques. Our findings, based on industry data from 4 software projects consisting of 30 releases, all in ecommerce domain, indicate that there is a significant relationship between pre/post release change requests initiated by the client and software defects. In addition, our data analysis indicates that changes in the design of the system at the later stages of software development i.e., during coding, testing and after release have a significant impact on the high severity defects that affect the major functionality of the system. Also, we found that insufficient time spent on the design phase and inadequate communication with the client could be some of the causes of requirements changes and consequently software defects.

An industrial case study on requirements volatility measures

“…Studies show that requirements volatility has a high impact on project performance [40,44]. Several aspects of requirements volatility have been studied, for example its impact on project or process performance [2,14,21,30,33,39,40,44], assessment and prediction [1,7,8,19], simulation models [14,33], and sources and causes of volatility [17,31,39,40]. Zowghi and Nurmuliani [44] perform an empirical study on requirements volatility and its impact on project performance.…”

Impact Propagation of Human Errors on Software Requirements Volatility

“… Requirement instability: defined as requirements that fluctuate between the earlier and later stages, and differ at the start and end of the project [8][37] [39].…”

An Investigation of Software Requirements Practices Among Software Practitioners : A Study in Jeddah

“…The majority of software development projects in the USA will take longer, cost more than planned and result in "out of specification" products that fail to meet user requirements [11]. Moreover, a report on a survey of over 3800 organizations in 17 European countries concluded that more than 50% of the perceived software problems were in the area of requirements specification and requirements management [12]. Based on this evidence, it can be stated that requirements are very important and it should be given extra attention because it leads to the successful of a software development project.…”