How does requirements quality relate to project success or failure?

Abstract

Our research goal is to find relations between requirements quality and project success. To attain the goal, we investigated 32 projects started and completed during the period of 2003-2005 in a large business application software development division of a company in Tokyo. Data of requirements specification quality evaluated by software quality assurance teams as well as overall project performance data in terms of cost and time overrun were available. Requirements specification quality data were first converted into a multiple-dimensional space, each dimension corresponding to an item of the recommended structure of software requirements specifications (SRS) defined in IEEE Std. 830-1998. We applied various statistical analysis techniques over the SRS quality data and project outcomes. Some interesting relations between requirements quality and project success or failure were found, including: 1) a relatively small set of SRS items have strong impact on project success or failure; 2) descriptions of SRS in normal projects tend to be balanced; 3) SRS descriptions in Section 1, where purpose, overview and general context of SRS are written, are rich in normal projects and poor in overrun projects; 4) when the descriptions of SRS Section 1 are poor white those of functions and product perspective are rich, the project tends to result in a cost overrun. © 2007 IEEE.