Managing change in software development using a process improvement approach

Describes the DESIRE (DESigned Improvements in Requirements Evolution) project, which is investigating novel ways to better manage change during software development. Our work has identified five key process improvement practices: (1) adopting a change improvement framework; (2) establishing an organisation-wide change process; (3) classifying change; (4) change estimation; and (5) measuring change improvement. In this paper, we describe each practice in detail and propose a change maturity model that reflects an organisation's capability to manage change.