Tracking requirements evolution by using issue tickets: a case study of a document management and approval system

Requirements evolve throughout the software life-cycle. When requirements change, requirements engineers must determine what software artifacts could be affected. The history of and rationale for requirements evolution provides engineers some information about artifact dependencies for impact analysis. In this paper, we discuss a case study of requirements evolution for a large-scale system governed by Japanese laws and regulations. We track requirements evolution using issue tickets created in response to stakeholder requests. We provide rules to identify requirements evolution events (e.g. refine, decompose, and replace) from combinations of operations (e.g. add, change, and delete) specified in the issue tickets. We propose a Requirements Evolution Chart (REC) to visually represent requirements evolution as a series of events over time, and implement tool support to generate a REC from a series of issue tickets using our rules to identify requirements evolution events. We found that the REC supports impact analysis and compliance efforts.