2. Rationale

Changes to requirements can be an indicator of software instability or an unclear description of the end product.  Regardless of the reason, requirements changes often mean increased costs, longer schedules, and changes in the technical features of the software.  Changes in requirements can result in rework and can affect software safety.

Collecting, analyzing, and managing requirements changes allow a project to control those changes and measure their impact.  Requirements change management can also provide early insights into the impact of those changes to the overall project's budget and schedule, including the ability to plan how to address changes rather than simply reacting when a change is made.

3. Guidance

Per NASA/SP-2007-6105, NASA Systems Engineering Handbook ²⁷³, managing changes to requirements is part of an overall requirements management process. "The Requirements Management Process is used to:

• "Manage the product requirements identified, baselined, and used in the definition of the WBS model products during system design;
• "Provide bidirectional traceability back to the top WBS model requirements; and
• "Manage the changes to established requirement baselines over the life cycle of the system products." ²⁷³

See SWE-052 for guidance on requirements traceability and SWE-080 for guidance on impact analysis, including cost, technical, and schedule impacts.

For contracted software development, the contract specifies the requirements management activities expected of the contractor (provider), including capturing requirements changes, managing requirements changes, analyzing those changes for cost, technical, and schedule impacts, and documentation of the analysis results.

Keep in mind that managing changes to requirements is an ongoing process that occurs throughout the project life cycle and needs to be planned for during project planning activities.

Capture and manage the changes

Consider using configuration management tools, requirements management tools, or change request tools to capture changes to requirements.  Many of these tools will keep version histories and are able to provide reports on the changes. Some of those reports may be useful to management when analyzing the impact of the requirements changes on the project.

Regardless of the capture method, projects need to collect a minimum set of data to describe the requested change.  See SWE-113 guidance for more information.

As part of managing requirements changes, the team needs to keep in mind the effect of "requirements creep" on software development, including its costs and complexity.  Those performing impact analyses or approving/disapproving requirements changes need to carefully scrutinize requests to avoid approving enhancements not required to accomplish the project goals and objectives.

Analyze the changes for cost, technical, and schedule impacts

Once change requests are documented, the team analyzes them for their effect on all parts of the software system as well as their effect on the overall system and project, as applicable to the level of change.  Typically, changes are reviewed by a Configuration Control Board (CCB) or other review board (see SWE-082) who can request or perform an impact analysis (see SWE-080) before determining how to disposition the change.

When performing analysis of changes, look for impacts such as:

• Impact to other parts of the software system (not just the immediate design or code where the change will occur): architecture, design, interfaces, concept of operations, higher- and lower-level requirements.
• Impact to other parts of the overall system (e.g., system requirements, interfaces, hardware).
• Safety, reliability, performance impacts.
• Skills needed (e.g., special expertise, additional developers, consultants).
• Rework effort (e.g., requirements specification, design, code, test, user manuals).
• New effort (e.g., code development, documentation, test case development, software assurance).
• Impact to stakeholders.
• Potential to introduce errors into the software.
• Criticality of affected software.

Traceability matrices and tools are useful when determining the impact of a change, but the team needs to update the traceability information to keep it current as changes to the requirements occur (see SWE-052, SWE-059, SWE-064, SWE-072).  Other relevant items, from NASA/SP-2007-6105, NASA Systems Engineering Handbook ²⁷³, include:

• Performance margins – "a list of key performance margins for the system and the current status of the margin... the propellant performance margin will provide the necessary propellant available versus the propellant necessary to complete the mission."
• Configuration management top evaluators list – "appropriate persons [to evaluate] the changes and providing impacts to the change... changes need to be routed to the appropriate individuals to ensure that the change has had all impacts identified."
• Risk system and threats list – "used to identify risks to the project and the cost, schedule, and technical aspects of the risk...A threats list is normally used to identify the costs associated with all the risks for the project."

The team uses the results of the impact assessment to determine the effect the change has on the project in terms of:

• Cost including personnel and equipment costs.
• Schedule including new or revised design, development, testing, and documentation effort.
• Technical impacts to the function of the software and overall system.

Document analysis results

Document and maintain with the project records the results of the impact analysis and any decisions based on that analysis.  Communicate the results to the appropriate stakeholders, i.e., project personnel who must implement approved changes, must update documentation related to those changes, must test those changes; system level personnel who must coordinate changes in response to this requirements change; as well as those affected if a requested change is not approved for implementation, including stakeholders outside the development team.

Other tasks

In addition to the activities noted above, managing changes to requirements may also include the following:

• Ensuring that relevant project plans are updated to reflect approved requirements changes.
• Ensuring change requests are created, assigned, and completed for work products affected by approved requirements changes, e.g., design documents, user manuals, interface specifications.
• Ensuring changed requirements and all related changed work products are verified and validated.
• Ensuring traceability documents are updated to reflect the requirements change.
• Ensuring that the rest of the project uses only the latest, updated project documents that reflect the requirements change.

Additional guidance related to the management of requirements changes may be found in the following related requirement in this handbook:

4. Small Projects

For projects with limited budgets or staff, spreadsheet programs may be used to manage the requirements and track changes to them, but when the number of requirements is large and a project can afford it, using an appropriate combination of a requirements management tool, a change management tool, and a change request tool can make managing requirements change easier for the project.

5. Resources

6. Lessons Learned

The NASA Lessons Learned database contains the following lesson learned related to managing requirements change:

• Lewis Spacecraft Mission Failure Investigation Board (Indirect contributors to loss of spacecraft.) Lesson Number 0625: "These indirect contributors [to the loss of the spacecraft] are to be taken in the context of implementing a program in the Faster, Better, Cheaper mode: Requirement changes without adequate resource adjustment." ⁵¹²