Exploring bottlenecks in market-driven requirements management processes with discrete event simulation

This paper presents a study where a market-driven requirements management process is simulated. In market-driven software development, generic software packages are released to a market with many customers. New requirements are continuously issued, and the objective of the requirements management process is to elicit, manage, and prioritize the requirements. In the presented study, a specific requirements management process is modelled using discrete event simulation, and the parameters of the model are estimated based on interviews with people from the specific organisation where the process is used. Based on the results from simulations, conditions that result in an overload situation are identified. Simulations are also used to find process change proposals that can result in a non-overloaded process. The risk of overload can be avoided if the capacity of the requirements management process is increased, or if the number of incoming requirements is decreased, for example, through early rejection of low-priority requirements.