Analyzing the impact of changing requirements

Determining the impact of requirement changes on software development is critical to project management. We present an impact analysis method to evaluate requirement changes for software development projects that is based on requirements traceability. By using attributes of the work products and traces, we create classes of requirement changes prioritized according to the potential impact. We present a case study that shows a favorable comparison between the actual impact and the predicted impact. Finally, we discuss the expansion of the method.