Change Risk Assessment: Understanding Risks Involved in Changing Software Requirements

One certainty in software development is that all projects will have to deal with change. Being able to effectively handle proposed changes is crucial for allowing continued development of a software project to occur. In order to effectively manage the changes and their effects, developers must first assess the risks involved in making the change. To understand the risks, the project manager must determine how the change will affect not only the source code, but also the entire project. These risks may affect a project’s schedule, budget, and quality factors. Risk assessment will help to determine if the desired change can be implemented into the system. This paper identifies risks associated with late changes to the software requirements. Late changes are those changes that occur after one cycle of the development process has been completed and a working version of the system exists. It is important to understand late changes, because late changes to requirements often result in the most cost to an ongoing development project both in time and money. In this paper we identify several key risks that must be addressed when dealing with late changes to requirements. Then we provide a discussion of techniques for handling