Agile Requirements Prioritization in Practice: Results of an Industrial Survey

Abstract

Abstract Agile software development stresses the importance of providing the customer with a product of a maximized business value. To achieve that, requirements prioritization is used. Agile development methods like Scrum define guidelines for prioritization, however practitioners do not necessarily have to follow them. Our goal was to investigate the industry practice related to requirements prioritization process, including its timing, participants, criteria used and prioritization techniques applied. We designed an on-line questionnaire (based on literature review) and conducted a survey involving practitioners from Polish IT industry. We received 69 valid responses indicating requirements prioritization practices in industrial Agile projects. We found out that despite the fact that business value is the most common criterion used to prioritize requirements, other criteria like complexity, stability and mutual interdependencies are considered as well. Other findings indicate that consideration of such multiple criteria requires different viewpoints, thus making requirements prioritization a process that has to involve many participants of different roles and competencies.