E-AHP: An Enhanced Analytical Hierarchy Process Algorithm for Priotrizing Large Software Requirements Numbers

Abstract

One of the main activities of software requirements analysis is requirements prioritization. The wrong requirements prioritization is risky as it leads to many software failures. The current requirements prioritization techniques can’t deal with large requirement numbers efficiently, which is considered one of their main issues. Many researchers have agreed that the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is one of the best prioritization techniques as it produces highly accurate results. AHP has two main problems: scalability and inconsistency. These problems have motivated us to propose an improved version of AHP for software requirements prioritization, namely Enhanced AHP (E-AHP). A performance evaluation has been done for the conventional AHP, E-AHP, and one of the recent algorithms that also try to solve the AHP scalability problems, namely removing eigenvalues and introducing the dynamic consistency checking algorithm into AHP (ReDCCahp) algorithms The evaluation shows which algorithm takes the least time, uses the least memory, produces the most consistent and accurate results, and has the highest scalability. The three algorithms have been evaluated by running their codes using different numbers of requirements ranging from 10 to 500. The results show that E-AHP is more scalable, takes the least time, uses the least memory, and produces the most consistent and accurate results compared to the other two algorithms. That becomes remarkable when the number of requirements increases. Therefore, E-AHP is suitable to be applied in large software projects, as it can deal efficiently with the large software requirements numbers.