Change request

A change request is declarative, i.e. it states what needs to be accomplished, but leaves out how the change should be carried out. Important elements of a change request are an ID, the customer (ID), the deadline (if applicable), an indication whether the change is required or optional, the change type (often chosen from a domain-specific ontology) and a change abstract, which is a piece of narrative (Keller, 2005). An example of a change request can be found in Figure 1 on the right.

Change requests have many different names, which essentially describe the same concept:

• Request For Change (RFC) by Rajlich (1999); RFC is also a common term in ITIL (Keller, 2005) and PRINCE2 (Onna & Koning, 2003).
• Engineering Change (EC) by Huang and Mak (1999);
• Engineering Change Request (ECR) at Aero;
• Engineering Change Order (ECO) by Loch and Terwiesch (1999) and Pikosz and Malmqvist (1998). Engineering Change Order is a separate step after ECR. After ECR is approved by Engineering Department then an ECO is made for making the change;
• Change Notice at Chemical;
• Action Request (AR) at ABB Robotics AB (Kajko-Mattson, 1999);
• Change Request (CR) is, among others, used by Lam (1998), Mäkäräinen (2000), Dennis, et al. (2002), Crnkovic, Asklund and Persson-Dahlqvist (2003) and at ABB Automation Products AB (Kajko-Mattsson, 1999).
• Operational Change Request (OCR).
• Enterprise Change Request (ECR).