An Empirical Investigation on Requirements Change Management Practices in Pakistani Agile Based Industry

Requirements engineering is the key process of software development. Effectively dealing with change in requirements is a challenge. Agile methods are flexible and accept change effectively. The question arises in our mind that which requirements change management practices are the utmost to follow? Through a questionnaire-based survey, we explored the Pakistani software development industry to identify the processes, methods, practices being followed by the agile practitioners for requirements change management, and ranked them based on the perceived importance. We identified 30 practices for agile requirements change management from literature study, and conducted a survey with 140 agile practitioners, countrywide. We used a Multi-criteria Decision Method (MCDM) ranking method i.e. PROMETHEE family of methods for ranking of the relative importance of the practices. The findings reveal the most important and highly ranked agile requirements change management practices. Moreover, in numerous cases, the perceived importance of the change management practices depends on the type of the software project (e.g. methodology, domain and type of application or project).