Correlations between Requirement Attributes and Process Attributes : Identifying and quantifying the correlations in a rapid software development process

Abstract: It is reported that the market-driven product development is becoming common in the software industry. There are two challenges in the market-driven product development: time-to-market and meeting customers’ requirements. A rapid software development process is regarded as a good way to solve those two challenges. Streamline development process (SLDP) is aligned with a rapid software development process, which is an in-house development process of Ericsson AB. In this study, seven completed projects from the streamline development process were investigated. The correlations between requirement attributes and process attributes were identified and quantified in the SLDP. Nine hypotheses were assumed. Four hypotheses were derived from the correlations from the other software development processes, and the other five hypotheses were derived from new requirement attributes and process attributes in SLDP. Two statistical software applications were used in the hypotheses testing. The results of those hypotheses showed that too much time spent in the early phase of streamline development would not reduce the time to market. A SLDP measurement program contains the measurements of requirement attributes and process attributes. This measurement program was mainly composed of four core attributes (size, effort, schedule, and fault), the requirement volatility, the completeness, the resource overrun, and the estimation accuracy. The results of the SLDP measurement program reflected four challenges in the SLDP: the requirement engineering process, the release planning, the estimation accuracy at each development phase, and the quality of the documentation. At last, based on those four challenges (the requirement engineering process, the release planning, the estimation accuracy at each development phase, and the quality of the documentation) and the defined correlations between requirement attributes and process attributes in the SLDP, the improvement opportunities were proposed for the SLDP.