Greening Software Requirements Change Management Strategy Based on Nash Equilibrium

Abstract

Recently, green computing has become more and more important in software engineering (SE), which can be achieved by effectively recycling the software system and utilizing the computing resources. However, the requirement change may lead to unnecessary labor and time cost. Moreover, it may also result in the waste of hardware and computing resources once unreasonable requirements are realized. Thus, to perform green computing in SE, it is necessary to propose effective strategies to manage the requirement change. For this decision-making problem, game theoretical methods can be feasible solutions. In this paper, we propose a novel requirement change management approach based on game theory. Specifically, we model the problem as a game between the stakeholders and the developer and devise the payoff matrix between different strategies of the players. We then propose a Nash equilibrium-based game theoretical algorithm to manage requirement change. The evaluation results show that, compared to the exhaustive algorithm, our method not only can achieve almost the same optimal results but also can significantly reduce the computational time complexity. Thus, our method is feasible for a lot of requirement changes and can facilitate the green computing targets from the perspective of software engineering.