One certainty in software development is that all projects will have to deal with change. Being able to effectively handle proposed changes is crucial for allowing continued development of a software project to occur. To effectively manage change, developers must assess the risks involved in making the change. To understand the risks, the project manager must determine how the change will affect the entire project. These risks may affect a project’s schedule, budget, and quality factors. This paper identifies risks associated with late changes to the software requirements. Late changes are those changes that occur after one cycle of the development process has been completed. It is important to understand late changes, because they often result in the most cost to an ongoing development project both in time and money. In this paper we identify several key risks that must be addressed when dealing with late changes to requirements. 1.

Requirements evolution captures information about how software systems change as a result of changes in requirements. The goal of this project is to identify how existing requirements engineering methods, tools and models can be extended to to support the analysis of requirements evolution. It is hoped that by providing a tool for analyzing requirements evolution, our work will spur further research on requirements evolution, thereby enriching the field of requirements engineering. We present a design which supports requirements evolution analysis within conventional requirement engineering processes by building on the models proposed by researchers. We implement this design as a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE. Our plug-in supports requirement analysis by providing visualizations as means of presenting requirement changes and evolution. i Acknowledgements In delivering this thesis, I have been fortunate enough to have been assisted by many individuals whom I wish to acknowledge here. First and foremost, a heart-felt note of thanks to Massimo Felici, my thesis supervisor, for his generosity in dispensing

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