Requirements maturation analysis based on the distance between the source and developers

Abstract

The success of a project is often affected by imperfect requirements. In order to cope with this risk, a requirements analyst needs to communicate with a client. However, communication between the requirements analyst and the client is not enough to prevent requirements imperfection, since requirements come from various sources, e.g. environment, laws, documents, actual usage, etc. The process of requirements elicitation is affected by the requirements stability, the ability of a requirements analyst, and accessibility of the source of requirements. This paper focuses on the distance between the source of requirements and a requirements analyst, and clarifies how the distance influences the requirements maturation. Requirements maturation represents the degree to which the requirements are elicited completely. We define a measure for observing requirements maturation and analyzing the accessibility of the source of the requirements. Then, we define a hypothesis. A case is analyzed in order to verify the hypothesis. As a result, there is a correlation between the requirements maturation efficiency and the accessibility of the source of the requirements.