Abstract for: The Complexity in Requirements Process Improvement

Requirements process improvement (RPI) of software projects has become an important area of research and professional practice. This paper discusses the structure of RPI that mitigates the rate of poor quality, and escalating cost or schedule for projects undertaking RPI. The efficiency with which the changing processes are managed determines how successful a project will be in terms of attaining a satisfactory balance between quality, cost and schedule of the delivered software systems. A number of software development companies suffer from ineffective RPI; therefore there is a need for understanding the dynamics of requirements pro- cess improvement as a means to facilitate RPI stakeholders in taking informed decisions that would lead to more successful RPI. The paper presents the system dynamics model structure for RPI and discusses the insights generated from the model. The authors suggest that the resulting model structure contributes to understanding requirements process improvement.