Inproceedings,
MEASURING REQUIREMENT EVOLUTION: A Case Study in the E-commerce Domain
International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Porto, Portugal, (April 2004)Poster?.
Abstract
Although requirement evolution is a widely recognized phenomenon, there are only a few approaches for
measuring it. These existing approaches are based on the assumption that all the requirements exist and can
be seen in the requirement elicitation and analysis phases. They do not include provisions for the emergence
during systems development of new requirements, which cannot be anticipated in the requirement elicitation
and analysis phase. This paper shows how the concept of requirements creep is adopted for the
measurement of emergent requirement evolution. We use a case study in the E-commerce domain to
illustrate the use of this measure in the prediction of systems development. The findings of this study
suggest that requirement evolution can be measured in a practical software project, and the findings
demonstrate the strong influence of requirements creep on the systems development effort. The findings of
our study encourage us to undertake further studies involving other organizations and projects.
