Defining Effort Indicators to Retrospectively Assess Engineering Change Information

The engineering change management becomes increasingly important in modern product development. Since the amount of changes, the complexity as well as the cost of engineering changes increases due to the complexity of technical systems, an efficient handling of changes is crucial. Hence, a systematic approach to investigate the engineering change management regarding the effort distribution within the technical system allows to increase transparency for optimizing the change handling. This paper therefore introduces effort indicators to investigate a technical system regarding its proneness to change effort. Hence, it defines indicators which enable an assessment of engineering change effort. Furthermore, it describes an approach to calculate the indicators based on past engineering change data by using network analysis.