A PROCESS MODEL FOR MANAGING REQUIREMENT CHANGE ABSTRACT Managing continuously changing requirements is a difficult and time consuming task in large projects. Change management if not done properly often leads to project failure. Requirement Change Management (RCM) process models are surveyed and evaluated on the criteria of roles, activities, artifacts and representation which are fundamental and necessary for a good process model. This evaluation is extended to update the work already done in literature. The deficiencies present in current RCM literature are highlighted. The ontology for process model has already been proposed elsewhere. Using that ontology we propose an RCM process model in this paper. This RCM process model improves upon the deficiencies identified, and it also introduces some new concepts. The process is modeled using UML activity diagram. The purpose of the process model is to provide a more complete and detailed guideline than already present. It will help the practitioners to effectively manage requirement change in large projects. KEYWORDS: Requirement Change Management, Decision Making, UML Activity Diagram, Process Modeling. 1. INTRODUCTION: Change is a phenomenon which is persistent through out the life cycle of a project. Changes in software occur due to change in application, users, laws and machines [1]. Most of these changes are traced back to changing requirements [2]. It is observed that quality of the end product depends a lot on the quality of the process followed, so there is a need for managing requirement change through a detailed and stepwise RCM process [3, 4]. The RCM process models from recent literature [2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,10] have been surveyed, synthesized and evaluated on the basis of essential elements of a process model and also the representation they cover [3, 11, 12]. The main focus of this paper is to propose an RCM process model based on literature survey and evaluation to eliminate the deficiencies present in current RCM process models. The literature survey and evaluation done in [3, 12] is extended in the paper to increase breadth of research in this area and benefit the proposed RCM process model. A process model helps facilitate human understanding and communication [3, 12]. We have proposed a RCM process model based on the ontology proposed in [3]. The process model includes all activities, roles and artifacts identified from literature which are found to be important and fundamental for RCM process model. Furthermore it also introduces the activity of decision making [13, 14, 15] and evaluation of impact analysis from multiple perspectives [16]. The proposed RCM process model is prescribed for large scale software development where RCM is of critical importance and managing change is a challenging task. The objective of this research is to propose an RCM process model which is detailed yet simple and stepwise for the practitioner in industry. UML activity diagram is used to model the process due to its ease of use, commonality and understandability in industry [17, 18, 19]. Section II presents the synthesis of literature survey, defines the evaluation criteria and presents evaluation. Section III defines the proposed RCM process model and section IV evaluates the proposed RCM process model. Section V defines application of the process model on a case study and finally section VI concludes the paper and provides directions for further research. 2. LITERATURE SURVEY: We, extending the work done in [3, 12], have surveyed and synthesized RCM process models [2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10] from literature (implicitly or explicitly present). All the process models are evaluated on the criteria defined below. The literature survey is concept centric. The breadth of the literature survey is covered by back and forth citations [20]. 3. EVALUATION CRITERIA: Process elements make up a model which helps in human understanding and communication [11, 12, 21, 22]. Every process model element has its own significance and purpose which it accomplishes. The process model Saima Imtiaz Mohammad Ali Jinnah University Islamabad, Pakistan saima-81@hotmail.com Salma Imtiaz International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan salma.imtiaz@iiu.edu.pk Naveed Ikram International Islamic University Islamabad, Pakistan naveed.ikram@iiu.edu.pk