Method for Systematic Assessment of Requirement Change Risk in Industrial Practice

Abstract

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.

Handling of Explicit Uncertainty in Requirements Change Management

“…To assess change likelihood both, exogenous change causes as well as requirement dependencies need to be analysed. Accordingly, the overall impact of a requirement change depends on the local change impact of a single requirement and the subsequent changes from propagation (Graessler et al, 2020).…”

Design, Simulation and Optimization of an Electrical Drive-Train

“…The central objective of the revision of the guideline is to adapt to greatly changed industrial environments; these changes result from the general trend towards cyber-physical systems, the increasing use of artificial intelligence and the analysis of large amounts of data, as well as further improved computer-aided synthesis and analysis methods. Current research in this topic area includes automated parameter selection [4], domain-specific modeling approaches [5], and the study of requirements change risk [6].…”

Systematische Bewertung von Auswirkungsanalysen des Engineering Change Managements

“…▪ Ergebnisorientierte Anforderungen: Die Ergebnisse der Auswirkungsanalyse müssen eine hinreichende Genauigkeit vorweisen und die qualitativen Ansprüche hinreichend erfüllen [13]. Die Ergebnisse der Auswirkungsanalyse sollen nachvollziehbar und transparent sein [40]. Die entstehenden Kosten einer potenziellen Änderung müssen anhand vorhandener Informationen bewertbar sein [2,31,41,42].…”