A position paper presented at the 1998 International Workshop on Component-Based Software Engineering

SACHER is a project that develops tools and methodology for software project requirement change management. In particular, software sensitivity to requirement changes is addressed. The focus of SACHER is on support for requirement change procurement. The project focuses on the domains of telecommunications and avionics.

It has been observed, and investigated during the early phases of the project, that the component structure, if any, of the changed software, greatly impacts such measures of change management as cost, effort, schedule, time to market, etc.

Apart from the many usual services for change management, the SACHER tools support a view of the anticipated change(s) in terms of a defined architecture, components, and cross-component properties. This is attempted also for software systems that do not explicitly support components. The paper evaluates how effective such attempts are for the procurers and how well they integrate with the entire functionality of software project requirement change management support.

SACHER is an international project partly financed by European Union under the Esprit programme (Esprit 23156). The major parts of the toolset include a product and process model database, a database of cost models, and modules supporting modeling, impact evaluation based on requirements traceability, cost evaluation and sensitivity evaluation as well as an integrated graphical user interface.

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