Analysis of Software Requirements Change Priorities Based on Complex Networks

Requirement change management is one of the most important process of software engineering. Requirements change occur frequently in open source community software projects. Because of the limited time and energy, it is important for developers of open source communities to decide which issues to be solved first. Understanding the priorities of requirement changes helps developers identify significant issues results in a better process of requirement change management, leading to a more dependable evolution of the project. In this context, a novel complex-network-based approach is proposed to analyze requirement changes with dependencies of requirements. First, the nodes of Associated Network of Requirement Change(ANRC) are issues of corresponding project, while edges are the dependencies of issues in the network. And then, corresponding weights are set according to different dependency types. The nodes in the network are later analyzed and sorted by centrality measures. In addition, temporal dimension is also considered.