Time spent on requirement and its effect on project success and development time Is there any evidence suggesting that time spent on writing up, or thinking about the requirements will have any effect on the development time? Study done by Standish (1995) suggests that incomplete requirements partially (13.1%) contributed to the failure of the projects. Are there any studies done which show that time spent on requirement analysis will have any effect on development time of a project, or how successful the project will be.
See Code Complete, By Steve McConnell, Table 3-1.
He compares the average cost of fixing defects based on when they're introduced and detected.
Detection at construction time costs 5-10 times more than detection at requirements time, and 10-100 times more post-release.

The table is based on the following sources:


"Design and Code Inspections to Reduce Errors in ProgramnDevelopment" (Fagan 1976)
Software Defect Removal (Dunn 1984)
"Software Process Improvement at Hughes Aircraft" (Humphrey, Snyder,
and WIllis 1991)


and several more