Impact analysis of requirement metrics in software development environment

Success of software project is extremely dependent on the quality of requirements. Requirements are the basis for planning project schedules as well as for designing and testing specifications. Even though there are good requirements in the beginning, it may be changed during the project development. Requirement changes during the software development process are also known as Requirements Volatility. Requirements volatility has great impact on the cost, the schedule and the quality of final product. Due to requirements volatility many projects fail and some are completed partially. Requirements volatility cannot be overcome fully but we can minimize it with some requirement measures or metrics. Requirement metrics are useful in identifying risks of a project by locating errors in the requirements document. This paper depicts the causes of requirements volatility and how these causes will affect the project development schedule, defects, project performance and quality of the product in the different phases of software development life cycle. It also studies and analyzes the impact of requirements volatility metric with the help of proposed workflow model and correlation coefficient values.