Requirements Prioritization Research Articles

Improving test efficiency through system test prioritization

Software testing is an expensive process consuming at least 50% of the total development cost. Among the types of testing, system testing is the most expensive and complex. Companies are frequently faced with budgetary constraints, which may limit their ability to effectively complete testing efforts before delivering a software product. We build upon prior test case prioritization research and present a system-level approach to test case prioritization called Prioritization of Requirements for Test (PORT). PORT prioritizes system test cases based on four factors for each requirement: customer priority, implementation complexity, fault proneness, and requirements volatility. Test cases for requirements with higher priority based upon a weighted average of these factors are executed earlier in system test. An academic feasibility study and three post hoc industrial studies were conducted. Results indicate that PORT can be used to improve the rate of failure detection when compared with a random and operational profile-driven random approach. Furthermore, we investigated the contribution of the prioritization factors towards the improved rate of failure detection and found customer priority was the most significant contributor. Tool support is provided for the PORT scheme which allows for automatic collection of the four factor values and the resultant test case prioritization.

Hybrid Decision Aspect Prioritization Technique for Globally Distributed Developments

In incremental software development, requirement prioritization is undertaken to make a decision about set of requirements to be implemented. Effectiveness of requirement prioritization depends on effectiveness of decision aspects selected for prioritizing requirements. This paper proposed new technique for prioritizing decision aspects in geographically distributed environments. This hybrid technique prioritizes the negotiated and hence mutually agreed decision aspects by creating win-win situation among diverse globally distributed stakeholders. Hybrid technique is applied on embedded payroll management software system that was failed project, delivered in two increments earlier. The results of the experiment conducted on the software system, were found to be very promising. Results proved the technique to be effective in terms of selection of highest priority aspects thereby enhancing customer satisfaction and ultimately resulting in successful software development.

A Novel Fuzzy Integrated Technical Requirements Prioritization Software System for Quality Function Deployment

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a complex methodology that develops products based on the assessment of customer needs (CNs). These CNs are then translated into technical requirements (TRs) in QFD. As it is not possible to consider all TRs , suitable evaluation of TRs which can efficiently govern the CNs is highly desired. This is achieved using prioritization of TRs. Moreover QFD uses linguistic expressions and traditional crisp scoring approach and thus the resultant outcome is imprecise and inconsistent. Albeit the available softwares may overcome the issue of prioritization of TRs, they lack to handle the uncertainty and vagueness involved. To this end, the paper aims to develop a novel fuzzy integrated technical requirements prioritization software system for QFD. The system is developed using Visual Basic (VB) and MS-Access. The system employs symmetrical triangular fuzzy numbers (STFNs) to deal with the involved uncertainty and vagueness. A real life example is presented to demonstrate the practicability of the software system.

Towards a usefulness-centered design: an analysis of participative and continuous co-construction of requirements in the context of emerging technologies

The main objective of this thesis is to support and to improve, with utility in consideration, the design process of artifacts in the context of emerging technologies. It was realized in the context of a Research-Action conducted as part of a real design project called 3DChild, which resulted in a virtual reality based software named “Appli-Viz’3D”.To meet our objective, we have chosen to focus on how utility is effectively dealt today in design community. Two main concerns guided our work. The first one was to analyze how utility and requirements are taken into account in design. From this point of view, we were interested in models, methods and tools used or advocated in marketing, industrial engineering, requirement engineering, software engineering, industrial design and ergonomics of design activities. We also explored representations of different profiles of designers on the utility and key elements in the process of construction of requirements. The second main interest was to study the effective contribution of stakeholders – designers and users – to the design of innovative artifacts through empirical studies. For this second line of research, we first aimed to analyze the global dynamics of the process of participative and continuous co-construction of requirements. We then focused on more specific issues of this process. We were particularly interested in the identification of requirements and in the proposal of specifications by different designers’ profiles. We finally studied the prioritization of requirements by different users’ profiles and the development of requirements, during the sessions of evaluation of the software Appli-Viz’3D in a participative context.At the end of this work, we propose two methodological contributions : a model of utility-centered design and an extension of a design method that is the I²I method. The model of utility-centered design is original because it is a framework to analyze, help or guide the inclusion of the utility in the design process. It theorizes the existence of two universes of utility : the prospective and retrospective universes. It formalizes the idea that the design involves a continuous dialectic between these two universes from the “analysis” phase where utility, form and detail of the software remain vague and speculative, to the “evaluation and test” phase where the final form is proven and continues to evolve in use. We propose also an extension of the I²I method in order to facilitate the integration of the user in the design process. In this sense, it is a methodological tool which aims to guide VR engineers to design products focused not only on the features, but also on the needs and expectations of end users. Our recommendations involve the integration of human specialists to achieve these steps.These methodological frameworks may provide tools for the Living Labs belonging to the European Network of Living Labs (EnoLL) supported by the European Commission. The objective of the Living Lab is to engage communities of users as soon as possible in the design process to co-create, explore, experiment and evaluate services, products or new uses before the implementation of an artifact. Their particularity is to establish a strong participatory dimension, because the end users, for whom the new product (or service) is built, is involved in the early stages of the design process, and their needs are taken into account throughout the project.

Prioritization of data quality dimensions and skills requirements in genome annotation work

AbstractThe rapid accumulation of genome annotations, as well as their widespread reuse in clinical and scientific practice, poses new challenges to management of the quality of scientific data. This study contributes towards better understanding of scientists' perceptions of and priorities for data quality and data quality assurance skills needed in genome annotation. This study was guided by a previously developed general framework for assessment of data quality and by a taxonomy of data‐quality (DQ) skills, and intended to define context‐sensitive models of criteria for data quality and skills for genome annotation. Analysis of the results revealed that genomics scientists recognize specific sets of criteria for quality in the genome‐annotation context. Seventeen data quality dimensions were reduced to 5‐factor constructs, and 17 relevant skills were grouped into 4‐factor constructs. The constructs defined by this study advance the understanding of data quality relationships and are an important contribution to data and information quality research. In addition, the resulting models can serve as valuable resources to genome data curators and administrators for developing data‐curation policies and designing DQ‐assurance strategies, processes, procedures, and infrastructure. The study's findings may also inform educators in developing data quality assurance curricula and training courses.

Managing software requirements changes based on negotiation-style revision

For any proposed software project, when the software requirements specification has been established, requirements changes may result in not only a modification of the requirements specification but also a series of modifications of all existing artifacts during the development. Then it is necessary to provide effective and flexible requirements changes management. In this paper, we present an approach to managing requirements changes based on Booth's negotiation-style framework for belief revision. Informally, we consider the current requirements specification as a belief set about the system-to-be. The request of requirements change is viewed as new information about the same system-to-be. Then the process of executing the requirements change is a process of revising beliefs about the system-to-be. We design a family of belief negotiation models appropriate for different processes of requirements revision, including the setting of the request of requirements change being fully accepted, the setting of the current requirements specification being fully preserved, and that of the current specification and the request of requirements change reaching a compromise. In particular, the prioritization of requirements plays an important role in reaching an agreement in each belief negotiation model designed in this paper.

Limitations of the Analytic Hierarchy Process Technique with Respect to Geographically Distributed Stakeholders

The selection of appropriate requirements for product releases can make a big difference in a product success. The selection of requirements is done by different requirements prioritization techniques. These techniques are based on pre-defined and systematic steps to calculate the requirements relative weight. Prioritization is complicated by new development settings, shifting from traditional co-located development to geographically distributed development. Stakeholders, connected to a project, are distributed all over the world. These geographically distributions of stakeholders make it hard to prioritize requirements as each stakeholder have their own perception and expectations of the requirements in a software project. This paper discusses limitations of the Analytical Hierarchy Process with respect to geographically distributed stakeholders' (GDS) prioritization of requirements. This paper also provides a solution, in the form of a modified AHP, in order to prioritize requirements for GDS. We will conduct two experiments in this paper and will analyze the results in order to discuss AHP limitations with respect to GDS. The modified AHP variant is also validated in this paper.

A priority-based approach for satisfying the diverse users’ needs, capabilities and expectations: a universal kitchen design case

Universal design process is a multi-constraint task due to many user requirements and the complexities caused by the interaction of the requirements in developing design solutions. Since all universal design requirements cannot be equally satisfied, a designer must determine the relative importance and implementation order of each requirement. Prioritisation of requirements is needed, not just to ignore the least important but also to guide designers while coping with dependencies, conflicts and trade-offs between multi-attribute requirements simultaneously. Thus, this study proposes a priority-based approach for satisfying diverse users’ needs, capabilities and expectations in a design process conducted in a computer environment. The planning game technique and the analytic hierarchy process technique using a cost–value approach are the two techniques that are applied in prioritising the diverse requirements. The derived priority information is incorporated into a CAD interface with a developed plug-in tool. A universal kitchen design is chosen as a case study for the priority-based approach. The results of the acceptability studies indicate that the proposed plug-in tool is found useful, understandable, efficient, helpful and satisfactory in universal design process and can be developed for various architectural design applications.

Business-oriented software process improvement based on CMMI using QFD

Software Process Improvement (SPI) has become the key to the survival of many software development organizations. As a follow-up of a previous paper on SPI for the CMM using Quality Function Deployment (QFD), a new SPI framework integrating QFD with the CMMI is developed. Similar to the earlier SPI framework for the CMM, the proposed SPI framework based on the CMMI using QFD aims to achieve three objectives: (1) to map process requirements, including business requirements, to the CMMI with the help of QFD; (2) to develop a method based on QFD for the integration and prioritization of requirements from multiple perspectives (groups); and (3) to be able to prioritize software process improvement actions based on process requirements. Process requirements from multiples groups of stakeholders (perspectives), including business goals, are integrated and prioritized. SPI actions are linked to these process requirements using QFD. Thus, the priorities of actions reflect the priorities of process requirements. By executing the actions with the highest priorities, the highest satisfaction level of process requirements can be achieved. One unique feature of the framework for the CMMI Continuous representation is that the priority values of these actions can be compared across PAs, even when the PAs attempt to reach different capability levels.

Simulating mixed agile and plan-based requirements prioritization strategies: proof-of-concept and practical implications

In this paper, we address the efficacy and pragmatics of mixing two primary strategies for requirements prioritization in order to incorporate the benefits of both plan-based (PB) and agile development methods while avoiding their drawbacks. As it is intractable to directly study the performance of strategies on real projects, we conducted a comprehensive empirically based simulation under a variety of conditions of requirements dynamism, project size, and duration. Simulation results suggest that a mixed strategy for requirements prioritization seems to work best in all but cost for typical levels of dynamism on average. Our findings also indicate that, as theorized, PB and agile strategies perform well within opposite extremes of dynamism. However, they do not outperform the mixed strategies even within their home grounds – that is large and complex systems with stable requirements for PB, and small and dynamic projects for agile methods. Given the unknown, unknowable, or variable nature of dynamism and the dramatic differences in effectiveness for agile and PB strategies under extreme development scenarios, a mixed strategy appears to yield the best results overall. We introduce two mixed strategies – simply adding cost–benefit (CB) to the agile approach, and a more sophisticated ‘hybrid’ (HY) approach that modulates development iteration size to maximize the expected CB for each iteration. We propose a step-by-step method to implement this HY strategy. We provide a structured analysis of the benefits and assumptions of agile and PB requirements prioritization methods (e.g., Pareto optimization), and outline a framework for analyzing and assessing the effectiveness of strategies including several new metrics. This research can furthermore serve as a framework for future validation of the proposed mixed strategies using actual software projects.

Towards automated requirements prioritization and triage

Time-to-market deadlines and budgetary restrictions require stakeholders to carefully prioritize requirements and determine which ones to implement in a given product release. Unfortunately, existing prioritization techniques do not provide sufficient automation for large projects with hundreds of stakeholders and thousands of potentially conflicting requests and requirements. This paper therefore describes a new approach for automating a significant part of the prioritization process. The proposed method utilizes data-mining and machine learning techniques to prioritize requirements according to stakeholders’ interests, business goals, and cross-cutting concerns such as security or performance requirements. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated and evaluated through two case studies based on the requirements of the Ice Breaker System, and also on a set of stakeholders’ raw feature requests mined from the discussion forum of an open source product named SugarCRM.

Practical challenges of requirements prioritization based on risk estimation

Requirements prioritization and risk estimation are known to be difficult. However, so far, risk-based requirements prioritization has not been investigated empirically and quantitatively. In two quantitative experiments, we explored practical challenges and needs of risk estimations in general and of our method MOQARE specifically. In the first experiment, ten students made individual estimations. In the second one, twenty-four students estimated risks in seven moderated groups. The students prioritized the same requirements with different methods (risk estimation and ranking). During the first experiment, we identified factors which influence the quality of the prioritization. In the second experiment, the results of the risk estimation could be improved by discussing risk estimations in a group of experts, gathering risk statistics, and defining requirements, risks and prioritization criteria more tangibly. This first quantitative study on risk-based requirements prioritization helps to understand the practical challenges of this task and thus can serve as a basis for further research on this topic.

Tool-supported requirements prioritization: Comparing the AHP and CBRank methods

Requirements prioritization aims at identifying the most important requirements for a software system, a crucial step when planning for system releases and deciding which requirements to implement in each release. Several prioritization methods and supporting tools have been proposed so far. How to evaluate their properties, with the aim of supporting the selection of the most appropriate method for a specific project, is considered a relevant question. In this paper, we present an empirical study aiming at evaluating two state-of-the art tool-supported requirements prioritization methods, AHP and CBRank. We focus on three measures: the ease of use, the time-consumption and the accuracy. The experiment has been conducted with 23 experienced subjects on a set of 20 requirements from a real project. Results indicate that for the first two characteristics CBRank overcomes AHP, while for the accuracy AHP performs better than CBRank, even if the resulting ranks from the two methods are very similar. The majority of the users found CBRank the “overall best” method.

A classification framework for software requirements prioritization approaches

The task of eliciting requirements has became extremely difficult because stakeholders have different perspectives on an expectation on a system. Besides, the time to obtain the final product is limited. To overcome this situation, a requirements ranking may help in planning releases by indicating which functions are critical and which ones can be added, and in what order, over successive releases. The prioritizing process must hold stakeholder satisfaction considering high-priority requirements first. However, practical experience shows that prioritizing requirements is not as straightforward task as the literature suggests. Considering that, this paper has two goals: the first one is to present a classification framework for software requirements prioritization approaches (emphasizing differences and similarities among eleven selected approaches); and the second one is to show the approaches' weaknesses and to propose possible improvements for future research on this line.

Supporting Roadmapping of Quality Requirements

Would slightly better performance be significantly more valuable from a market perspective? Would significantly better performance be just slightly more expensive to implement? When dealing with performance, usability, reliability, and so on, you often end up in difficult trade-off analysis. You must take into account aspects such as release targets, end-user experience, and business opportunities. At the same time, you must consider what is feasible with the evolving system architecture and the available development resources.Quality requirements are of major importance in the development of systems for software-intensive products. To be successful, a company must find the right balance among competing quality attributes. How should you balance, for example, investments for improved usability of a mobile phone's phone book and better mobile positioning? In the context of quality requirements, decision making typically combines market considerations and design issues in activities such as roadmapping, release planning, and platform scoping. Models that address requirements prioritization in a market-driven context often emphasize functional aspects. (For a comparison of other relevant techniques with Quper, see the sidebar.) Quper provides concepts for reasoning about quality in relation to cost and value and can be used in combination with existing prioritization approaches.

Industry evaluation of the Requirements Abstraction Model

Software requirements are often formulated on different levels and hence they are difficult to compare to each other. To address this issue, a model that allows for placing requirements on different levels has been developed. The model supports both abstraction and refinement of requirements, and hence requirements can both be compared with each other and to product strategies. Comparison between requirements will allow for prioritization of requirements, which in many cases is impossible if the requirements are described on different abstraction levels. Comparison to product strategies will enable early and systematic acceptance or dismissal of requirements, minimizing the risk for overloading. This paper presents an industrial evaluation of the model. It has been evaluated in two different companies, and the experiences and findings are presented. It is concluded that the requirements abstraction model provides helpful improvements to the industrial requirements engineering process.

Value-Oriented Requirements Prioritization in a Small Development Organization

Requirements engineering, especially requirements prioritization and selection, plays a critical role in overall project development. In small companies, this often difficult process can affect not only project success but also overall company survivability. A value-oriented prioritization (VOP) framework can help this process by clarifying and quantifying the selection and prioritization issues. A case study of a small development company shows a successful VOP deployment that improved communications and saved time by focusing requirements decisions for new product releases on core company values

Using an updating urn-scheme for prioritising quality requirements in the early stage of collaboration design

The effective prioritisation of quality requirements (QR) at the early stage in collaborative product development is studied. The proposed urn-scheme method in prioritising QRs differs from the existing voting mechanisms in two major directions. Firstly, the proposed method explicitly incorporates social dynamic factors such as interpersonal trust and trustworthiness into the voting process. These latent factors are quantified and measured allowing us to visualise their effects on individual stakeholder's prioritisation list. Secondly, with the most trusted stakeholders' prioritisation lists amplified and the least trusted stakeholders' opinions down weighed, the final combined prioritisation list, weighing over all individual lists, is the direct result of voting and social dynamics, all quantified, and thus, relative importance of quality requirements can be derived.

HIERARCHICAL CUMULATIVE VOTING (HCV) — PRIORITIZATION OF REQUIREMENTS IN HIERARCHIES

Decision support in requirements engineering is an activity that plays an important role in enabling the delivery of value to stakeholders. Requirements prioritization has been identified as an integral (and important) part of requirements negotiation and release planning in incremental software development, which makes prioritization a key issue in requirements engineering decision support. The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) has for long been considered as the technique to use when prioritizing requirements on a ratio scale. Several studies have reported positively about AHP, but lately a number of studies have also reported about weaknesses, without identifying any better ratio-scale alternatives. In this paper, the strengths and weaknesses of AHP and another ratio-scale prioritization technique, Cumulative Voting (CV), are compared. Based on this comparison, a new technique for prioritizing hierarchically structured requirements on a ratio scale is presented, called Hierarchical Cumulative Voting (HCV). HCV addresses the weaknesses of AHP while inheriting the strengths of CV. The suitability of HCV is discussed theoretically as well as in the light of empirical results from using HCV and CV in industrial settings. It is concluded that HCV seems very promising, but additional empirical studies are needed to address some of the open questions about the technique.

Shifts in foci and priorities. Different relevance of requirements to changing goals yields conflicting prioritizations and is viewpoint‐dependent

AbstractStakeholders judge goal relevance and software–development project requirements differently, considering them from a business versus a personal viewpoint. Three empirical studies provided evidence that stakeholders' personal goals for a system are valued higher than business goals and that, moreover, changes in personal goals lead to significantly more prioritization activity than changes in business goals. In Study 1, police officers expressed their agreement to a list of requirements on a Capacity Management System from a business and a personal viewpoint. We found a ‘requirements‐analysis rift,’ indicating that stakeholders regard requirements as business‐related, agreeing with them even if these requirements do not match their personal goals. In Study 2, science students rank‐ordered the same list of requirements on an e‐learning environment from a university and a personal perspective. In Study 3, we conducted a similar study with a sample of financial consultants. The latter two studies revealed that, when personal goals changed, prioritization shifts were stronger than when business goals changed. In addition, we suggest a method using the Spearman rho statistic to calculate changes in requirements prioritization under different conditions of goal change. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.