Software requirement management process

Abstract : Requirement is the term that concern with the desire characteristics of product. The proj ect failure rate is about 50 to 60 percent but this is not about programming issues it’s because the customer’s needs does not fulfill. We perform the systematic literature review to present the importance of requirement management process, discussed how t he requirements manage in different agile methodologies, show 2 proposed models to improve the requirement management process and discuss their phases, see the picture about how the requirement management process works in an organization by using two stage questionnaire assessment methodology and discussed the limitation about proposed models.

Keywords : software requirement management process, agile requirement management process, importance of RMP, requirement management activitite.

INTRODUCTION

Requirement engineering is the field that concerns the requirements should be documented and analyze. It consists on requirement analysis and requirement specification.

Requirement engineering means that requirements that are concern with the system sho uld be managed, defined and tested systematically. Requirement engineering is not only the change of process and technology but also the change of behavior and culture.

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Requirement engineering is the process where the requirements will be discover ed, docum ented analyze and manage. The main purpose of this paper is to describe that recently what the work has been done in requirement management process. There are 46 percent complains about software development teams that the product does not meet the needs of customer requirement what customer wants is an easy question but the answer is very difficult to give [4].

The change that occurs in requirement are mostly due to business, law or environment [1].

The remaining paper is divided into different sections. Se ction II describe the previous work on requirement management process. Section III describe the methods that we use to collect the previous literature work on requirement management process. Section IV summarize the result as well as the analysis. Section V discuss the analysis of proposed models and case study. Section V I discuss the limitation or constraints, commonalities and differences about the requirement management process. Section VI I concerns about the conclusion that we gather by literature revie w.

RELATED WORK

Dhirendra Pandey & Vandana Pandey examined the importance of requirement management in requirement engineering concern [1]. Requirement management is the process that related to eliciting, documenting the requirement and communicating. Requ irement management is about manage the change in requirement and maintain the traceability in requirement management. To collect the requirement is not an easy task. If the requirements are unclear that we gathered from the stakeholder then it can lead us to bad requirement engineering [1].

Ali Altalbe presents the main key principles of requirement management [2].

• Stakeholder should be involved in the very first stage of software development life cycle.
• It should be analyze that the requirement presents wh ich context either functional or non -functional.
• Different roles have different mind sets, intentions, ethics etc. then separate those role’s requirements too e -g user, customer, supplier etc.

Planning project, work estimation, progress tracing and lea rning for future are the practices for requirement management that are divided in these categories and follow by the industry [2]. Process, technology and people as a factor these three things are important for the implementation of the practices.

Change management is the task that describe which requirement is able to execute the change . Management change process trace the requirement that is going to change [2].

When the systems becomes larger then manage the requirement also becomes difficult [3]. Nomi baruah shows us that in agile methodologies how the requirement management handle in different methods [3]. If the development team follow the agile process then the requirement will be changed in any phase of software development lifecycle [3].

Hafeez MS, Farhan Rasheed and Khan MR they proposed a model for requirement management process that was the extended and improved version of Nathan q moqk [8] [4].

Traceability matrix used in extended version to trace the requirement [4] . In Nathan model there was a n issue related about traceability. So in improved version a phase is added called traceability phase to focus on those requirement that did not resolve in negotiating stage [4].

Arif Ali Khan, Shuib Basri , P .D.D. Domin ic1 and Fazal -e- Amin proposed a model for requirement change management in collocated software development [5]. The model manage different changes in requirement at different phases of development lifecycle [5].

Gonzalo Cuevas , Alan Serrano and Ariel Serrano present a picture of how the requi rement management process works in an organization [6]. They used the two stage questionnaire assessment methodology [6].

Dong Seok Oh and Sung Yul Rhew proposed a model that was the complement on previous studies and follow the guideline of requirement e ngineering and standards and applied in practical field [7]. The model is based on karl’s requirement engineering theory and follow the software process knowledge area of SWEBOK [7].

III. RESEACH METHOLOGY

We search journals, conferences and some case studies too. We avoid those research papers that did not include our search keywords. We create our research questions like

• RQ1: what are the practices in requirement management?
• RQ2: requirement management process using agile methodology
• RQ3: proposed models in requirement management process
• RQ4: what is importance of requirement management in requirement engineering?

We use google scholars, research gate, semantic scholars, IEEE and ACM to gather the previous work about requirement management process.

Search criteria

We divide the search criteria into 3 parts:

• C1: it is related to keywords to RMP in agile methodology such as RMP in scrum, RMP in FDD and RMP in kaban.
• C2: it is related to keywords to requirement management process such as requirement management pr actices, requirement management activities, requirement management model.
• C3: it is related to keywords to requirement control process such as requirement change process, requirement configure process.

Inclusion and exclusion criteria

In inclusion cr iteria, research papers include the case studies of requirement management process, requirement management process in agile methodology and importance of requirement management process.

And exclusion criteria, research papers do not explicitly focuses on r equirement management process.

RESULT

Dhirendra Pandey & Vandana shows the importance of requirement management by using SRS. Requirement are documented by different diagrams like DFD use to understand the problem. Formal specification of requirements based on mathematical notation and used to tell the requirement corr ectness and incompleteness. Requirement also validate and verify. Requirement management process is basically used to manage the change that occurs in requirement. Changes are unavoidable because of system errors and to understand the customer’s need for h is product development. Requirement document system shows the external behavior of the product. If the requirement is well written then the system will meet the desire goals . [1]

• Nomi baruah used different agile methodologies to show the requirement manage ment in agile. [3]
• Name of methodology Requirement management XP Requirement addresses by the onsite customers and user stories.
• Scrum Also used user stories for requirement and actual requirement are defined.
• Product owner play the lead role in software development. FDD In FDD requirement represents in uml diagrams.
• Lean software development Requirements are gather by the end user and gather their input too.

Adaptive Software Development(ASD)

• Requirement gathering will be done on speculative phase and objectives, constraints also identify in this phase.
• Hafeez MS, Farhan Rasheed and Khan MR proposed the model that is based on traceability technique [4] .
• Obje ctive: what’s the customer needs?
• Binding constraint: a problem which solution is exist already
• Non -binding constraint: a problem that does not solve by our solution.
• Conflict: when a new conflict occurs due to non -binding and binding conflict.

Traceabilit y of conflict: trace the conflict among two constraints and perform the impact analysis and find out which constraint is much more important for the user. [4]

Arif Ali Khan, Shuib Basri , P .D.D. Dominic1 and Fazal -e- Amin studied different literature reviews about requirement change management case studies and requirement engineering books that are related to real life experience about requirement change management implementation. They proposed a model that are divided into 7 stages like request, validate, verify, reject, implement, batch and update. Working of the proposed model [5]

• Collect all the information related about change. (request)
• What will be the impact of this change on budget, time and other system components? (validate stage)
• If the request wil l not be accepted then it will be pass in reject stage.
• Some request will be pass on batch stage these requests will be implement in future if the limitation would be ended. Otherwise requests will be pass on reject stage. (batch stage)
• All the request wh ich are accepted implements in this stage. (implement stage)
• System will be updated according to the change.

And inform all the stakeholders about it. (update stage) [5]

Diagram of proposed model of requirement change management [5].

Gonzalo Cuevas , Alan Serrano and Ariel Serrano use the assessment methodology based on two stage questionnaire to extract the information about the current state of requirement management process and identify that which practices performed but not documented, which practice s require priority and which practices does not implemented due to bad management. They used closed questions method with seven possible answers for better understanding related to the process. [6]

Performed two types of practices 1 st one is specific pra ctice and 2 nd is general practice. [6]

Specific practice perform by designers, developers, analyst, and programmers that execute the processes. [6]

General practice perform by senior management, system management, team leads and software manager. [6]

Data calculated by taking the arithmetic mean of valid answers. If the average result is less than 75% then it will be considered that these practices do not perform in organization and should be improved and if the score above than 75% will be considered i n strong points. [6]

Dong Seok Oh and Sung Yul Rhew proposed the model that carried 6 activities and 30 tasks to perform the RMP process practical. In activity one all the requirements structured according to the user’s needs. In activity 2 make the requi rement baseline according to the requirement specifications. In activity 3 gather the requirement data from baseline and make the plan. In activity 4 control and monitor the changes in requirement. In activity 5 evaluate the quality of requirements.in acti vity 6 close the requirement management process after execution. [7]

Ali Altalbe present some methods for change management like

• Identify the change that are occur in requirement, recognize the functionality of requirement.
• The collection that is related to processes and stages called change control in which make the baseline again and are require to change the configuration item’s feature. [2]

Issues occur in managing change

Whenever the change is occur it also effect the data storage, if the changes are require in database then the application modification will also be changed [2]. If the data movement is not correct then the information will be compromised, mayb new code changes compromise the security of data, if the quality of change do not meet the previous quality then the process will be fail, whenever the changes begins it will be better to make the document about it.[2]

Approach for change control

Whenever the change occurred the baseline updated. Few steps to handle a request for baseline updat e: [2]

• Change request will be submit and present the financial cost and also about resources.
• Then access the change request.
• If the request is accepted then pass the change request to the development team.
• When the changes validate and examined by quality control then update the baseline too.

Requirement traceability shows the completeness and consistency of system requirement. Requirement management tool is used to keep the track of requirements. [2]

ANALYSIS

Dong Seok Oh and Sung Yul Rhew applie d their model in O company for general business. Made the hierarchical structure for user’s needs. Assign the requirement attributes and identify and prioritize the requirements then make the baseline of requirements after discuss it with the user. Evaluate the requirement management process effectiveness by measure the quality of requirements through tasks before the process applied. [7]

Comparison with previous studies [7]

Hafeez MS, Farhan Rasheed and Khan introduced the new phase that only focus the constraints that do not solve and also required the user involvement. Conflicts that are related to binding and non -binding conflict will be solved on binding and non -binding stages if these conflicts do not solve then move on the traceability stage and t here user involvement will be required. [4]

Case study was conducted on Mexico City and use the requirement management process. Comparative analysis of specific practice and general practice both result below than 75%. [6]

DISCUSSION

Assessment methodology do not show the improvement but tells the current stage of requirement management process. [6]

The main purpose of the model that is proposed by Arif Ali Khan, Shuib Basri , P .D.D. Dominic1 and Fazal -e-Amin is to handle the requirement change m anagement. And to overcome the shortcoming of existing models [5]

Nomi baruah use the different agile methodologies to show us that how the requirement management handle in agile but does not show any approach that if the change occurs in requirement then how to handle that change [3] .

CONCLUSION

The main purpose of this literature review is to present the current state of requirement management process. This paper discussed the requirement management practices by using agile methodologies. If the requirement gather in a correct way then it will help to build the good software. 2 models was proposed to improve the requirement management process. We discussed the key principles for requirement management. It should be better if we use the too l for requirement management process to keep the track of requirements. We also pictured that how the requirement management process work in an organization of already conducted case study.

REFERENCES

1. Dhirendra Pandey & Vandana Pandey , “Importance of Req uirement Management : A Requirement Engineering Concern”, ISSN (Print): 2319 5479, Volume -1, Issue  1, 2012 .
2. Ali Altalbe , “Software Requirements Management” (IJARAI) International Journal of Advanced Research in Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 4, No.4, 201 5.
3. Nomi baruah , “Requirement Management in Agile Software Environment” , The 2015 International Conference on Soft Computing and Software Engineering (SCSE 2015) .
4. Hafeez MS, Farhan Rasheed and Khan MR , “An Improved Model for Requirement Management System”  J Inform Tech Softw Eng 7: 196. doi: 10.4172/2165 -7866.1000196 .
5. Arif Ali Khan, Shuib Basri , P.D.D. Dominic1 and Fazal -e-Amin , “A Process model for Requirements Change Management in Collocated Software Development” , Conference Paper · October 2012 DOI: 10.1 109/IS3e.2012.6414949 .
6. Gonzalo Cuevas , Alan Serrano and Ariel Serrano , “Assessment of the requirements management process using a two -stage questionnaire” ,  Fourth International Conference on Quality Software, 2004. QSIC 2004. Proceedings., Braunschw eig, Germany, 2004, pp. 110 -116.
7. Dong Seok Oh and Sung Yul Rhew , “An Empirical Study on Requirement Management Process for Implementation Project of Information System” , Lecture Notes on Software Engineering, Vol. 2, No. 1, February 2014 .
8. Mogka NW, “A Requirement s Management System Based on an Optimization Model of the Design Process,” Procedia Computer Science (2014) 28: 221 -227.