New change impact factor estimation in software development

Abstract

Change in software is always an essential part of software development and maintenance. Estimating a proposed change's effect on the later phases of the development helps project managers and developers with decision-making and predicting future progress. During development, on some occasions, speedy solutions are necessary to meet project schedules. Such quick changes may lead to major quality flaws in the long term, even though they solve local problems in the short term. Controlled management of change is achieved by being able to estimate the impact of changes. In this paper, we propose a new change impact factor estimation and present the design of an experiment to measure these effects, describe its application, and show the measured results of the change impact.