A Review on Requirements Prioritization Approaches of Software Project Management

Abstract

Planning, executing, monitoring, and managing software projects are the primary concerns of software project management (SPM). SPM is a branch of the broader project management discipline. SPM covers the knowledge, methods, and tools required to manage software project development. An essential part of SPM is requirements prioritization, which is used to decide which features or needs will be executed first or which releases will include those features or requirements. At the outset of any software development process and project, requirements are elicited, and the projects will be chosen based on their worth to the market and the product itself. However, the existing requirements prioritization approaches fail to consider all the necessary factors to establish these priority demands. Some of these factors are risk, time to market, value, the total number of requirements, cost, and the outcomes of both functional and non-functional requirements. Therefore, this paper aims to review the existing requirements prioritization approaches used in SPM. To reach this goal, a narrative review methodology was used to evaluate and summarise a body of scientific literature that came from a number of different scientific sources. The results confirm that there are several approaches used in SPM to prioritize the requirements in descending order of importance. Nonetheless, the discussion in this review is restricted to just 17 different studies. The authors provide an overview of the main results and suggest further research directions. This study may guide both researchers and practitioners toward the best method for doing the requirements prioritization task.