An Approach to Managing Requirements Change Systematically in Software Product Lines

As the software development process becomes complicated, software requirements become complicated, too. Many efforts are needed in requirements management. It is impossible to define all requirements of software at first, and the development environment changes as project is gone. As the cost of requirements change management is much more than development cost, the changes should be controled immediately through systematic change management. In this paper, I suggest a method to manage requirements change systematically based on the change management process in software product lines. The requirements change at the application engineering process is analyzed and managed using the domain engineering process because the application requirements are customized from the domain requirements in software product lines. Such the consistent change management helps to make decisions about changes by change impact analysis and alternative solution design. Through this method, the potential change costs can be saved because same change requests are not repeated by controlling the change requests completely.