An investigation of changing requirements with respect to development phases of a software project

Many requirement changes are proposed during the lifecycle of a software project. Management of these changes is, therefore, necessary for the successful development of a software project. For the management of the changing requirements, it is necessary to investigate the changing requirements with respect to development phases of a software project. In this paper, data is collected from the software industry of Pakistan and changing requirements are analyzed with respect to all development phases of a software project. By using the descriptive statistics, and Spearman´s rho, the relationship of changing requirements among all development phase of a software project is analyzed. It has been identified that customer requests for changes in each development phase of a software project. However maximum change requests are received from customer in maintenance phase of the software project. It has been identified that if more changes are requested in early development phases, then fewer changes are requested in later development phases of a software project. There is a significant relationship between the changes requested in the requirement analysis phases and the changes requested in the design phase. There is also a significant relationship between the changes requested in the design phase and the changes requested in the testing phase.