About the journal

• Home page
• Contact information
• Aims and scope
• Indexing information
• Editorial policies
• ComSIS consortium
• Journal boards
• Managing board

For authors

• Information for contributors
• Paper submission
• Article submission through OJS
• Copyright transfer form
• Download section

For readers

• Forthcoming articles
• Current issue
• Archive

For reviewers

• View and review submissions

News

• Journal's Facebook page
• Calls for special issues
• New issue notification

A method of assessing rework for implementing software requirements changes

Shalinka Jayatilleke¹ and Richard Lai²

1. Department of Management, Sports and Tourism
   La Trobe University, Victoria. 3086, Australia
   s.jayatilleke@latrobe.edu.au
2. Department of Computer Science and Computer Engineering
   La Trobe University, Victoria. 3086, Australia
   R.Lai@latrobe.edu.au

Abstract

Software development is often affected by user/system requirements changes. To implement requirements changes, a system which is being developed needs to be reworked. However, the term “Rework” has not been clearly defined in the literature. Depending on the complexity of the changes, the amount of rework required varies from some software module modifications to a non-trivial alteration to the software design of a system. The effort associated with such a rework obviously will vary too. To date, there has been scant research on rework assessment, and the relationship between it and change effort estimation is hardly understood. In this paper, we present a definition for rework, and describe a method of assessing rework for implementing software requirements changes. Our method consists of three stages: namely (i) change identification; (ii) change analysis; and (iii) rework assessment. To demonstrate the practicality that it enables developers to compare the rework between the different options available for implementing a requirements change and to identify the one which is less invasive and requires lesser amount of modifications to the software system design, we explain our concept with the use of a running example.

Key words

Rework, Rework assessment, Requirements changes, Requirements change management, Software System Design Document

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS200221032J

Publication information

Volume 18, Issue 1 (January 2021)
Year of Publication: 2021
ISSN: 2406-1018 (Online)
Publisher: ComSIS Consortium

Full text

Available in PDF
Portable Document Format

How to cite

Jayatilleke, S., Lai, R.: A method of assessing rework for implementing software requirements changes. Computer Science and Information Systems, Vol. 18, No. 1, 129–154. (2021), https://doi.org/10.2298/CSIS200221032J