Requirements Maturation Analysis by Accessibility and Stability

The success of any projects can be affected by requirements changes. We define requirements elicitation as the activity of adding, deleting, and modifying requirements. We here refer to the completion of requirements elicitation of a software component as requirements maturation. The requirements of the component will never be changed after 100% maturation. We introduce the requirements maturation efficiency (RME) in order to estimate the requirements maturation period for the component. The RME of the requirements represents how quickly the requirements of a component reach 100% maturation. The goal of this paper is to define a method of estimating the RME of each component. Since requirements analysts (RAs) elicit requirements by accessing requirement sources and stability is one of the characteristics of requirements, we can assume that the RME of a component must be derived from the accessibility of the requirements source and the stability of the requirements. We model accessibility as the number of information flows from the source of the requirements to the RA and model stability with the requirements maturation index (RMI). The results from multiple regression analysis for two cases indicate that RME can be derived by these two factors with a significant level of 5%. We also discuss a method by which to estimate the period for requirements maturation.