Introducing requirements change management process into ISO/IEC 12207

Abstract

Requirements Engineering (RE) is one of the critical phases of any software development life cycle. Business and technology evolution increasingly poses many challenges and becomes a source of continuous change in RE. Changes to software are inevitable in the development process and are a source of project risk. During the last decade many Requirements Change Management (RCM) models have been proposed, but this area appears to remain rudimentary in software process standards. Configuration management process has been introduced in ISO/IEC 12207:2017; however, it does not fully address RCM problems. This paper proposes an RCM Process (RCMP) to address this issue. The process is extended to a theoretical model based on seven core essentials that were identified in the literature. Furthermore, the process is modeled in a Composition Tree (CT), a semi-formal graphic notation, and then we have compared the new process with existing Configuration Management (CM) process to highlight the differences. Our proposed process significantly addresses the deficiencies of existing change management process.