Software Change Impacts - An Evolving Perspective
ICSM '02 Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'02)
Dealing with Missing Software Project Data
METRICS '03 Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Software Metrics
Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Human Computer Interaction
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Requirement changes early in the software design process are an expected part of the iterative development process and have been effectively analyzed [1] and modeled [2]. Mid-project requirement changes are an unanticipated but inevitable part of software development. The effect of mid-course requirement corrections has not been effectively modeled primarily because separating the costs of redesign, recoding and retesting from more general project expenses is difficult. Furthermore, the effect of mid-project design changes on actual profitability is complex. In addition to the effort and overhead spent to implement the requirement changes there is an opportunity cost in that diverted hours could have been spent more profitably on the development and coding of other projects. This poster describes the development of a model to estimate the effect of mid-project requirement changes on unit P&L in collaboration with the BearingPoint Hattiesburg Software Development Center. Major challenges include tracing requirement changes through dependent task and test cases, eliciting detailed task level effort from more general project accounting [3], effectively dealing with missing data [4], and estimating opportunity cost [5,6]. The development of an estimation formula based upon gathered data is discussed. And, the progress toward a more accurate model of the effect of mid-project requirement changes is explored.