Prioritization and Selection of the Software Requirements using Rough-Set Theory

Abstract

Software requirements prioritization and selection is an important activity of the requirements elicitation process. The objective of this process is to prioritize the software requirements so that high-ranked requirements can be selected for implementation. The information stored in the fuzzy-based methods contains vague or uncertain statements of stakeholder’s perceptions. This is modeled by the different types of membership functions. In these methods, selection of the membership function depends on the subjective judgements and thus it lacks objectivity. As a result, it may change the ranking values of the software requirements. To address this issue, this paper presents a method for the prioritization and selection of the software requirements using rough-set theory. The proposed method is compared with three fuzzy-based methods which are used to calculate the ranking values of software requirements. Both small and large set of requirements of an examination system have been used in comparative study based on the following criteria: (a) agreement measure, (b) number of judgements by decision makers, and (c) modeling of uncertainty.