Measuring the Impact of Changing Requirements on Software Project Cost: An Empirical Investigation

It is generally accredited that software development is a dynamic process so during the development of a software project many requirement changes are proposed. Literature shows that these proposed changes have the potential to affect the software development in different dimensions. Among these dimensions, cost is major. This paper demonstrates the impact of a requirement change on the cost of a software project in terms of development effort, i.e. total working hours to implement that change. In our study, a new approach is suggested to compute the effort with the help of Regression Equation. This equation is derived by performing Correlation and Regression analysis on the change request data. The data is collected from nine different software projects of Pakistan’s software Industry. Proposed approach is based on a conceptual model for cost estimation presented in this paper. In this empirical study, a systematic impact analysis approach is also discussed to analyze how the impact of a change in requirement propagates from one phase of Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to other phases.