Requirement Change Prediction Model for Small Software Systems

Abstract

The software industry plays a vital role in driving technological advancements. Software projects are complex and consist of many components, so change is unavoidable in these projects. The change in software requirements must be predicted early to preserve resources, since it can lead to project failures. This work focuses on small-scale software systems in which requirements are changed gradually. The work provides a probabilistic prediction model, which predicts the probability of changes in software requirement specifications. The first part of the work considers analyzing the changes in software requirements due to certain variables with the help of stakeholders, developers, and experts by the questionnaire method. Then, the proposed model incorporates their knowledge in the Bayesian network as conditional probabilities of independent and dependent variables. The proposed approach utilizes the variable elimination method to obtain the posterior probability of the revisions in the software requirement document. The model was evaluated by sensitivity analysis and comparison methods. For a given dataset, the proposed model computed the low state revisions probability to 0.42, and the high state revisions probability to 0.45. Thus, the results proved that the proposed approach can predict the change in the requirements document accurately by outperforming existing models.

Keywords

• prediction models
• software requirements
• Bayesian network
• variable elimination
• quality
• ambiguity