Requirements Prioritization Techniques Research Articles

Requirements Prioritization Techniques Comparison

Requirements prioritization is considered as one of the most important approaches in the requirement engineering process. Requirements prioritization is used to define the ordering or schedule for executing requirement based on their priority or importance with respect to stakeholders’ viewpoints. Many prioritization techniques for requirement have been proposed by researchers, and there is no single technique can be used for all projects types. In this paper we give an overview of the requirement process and requirement prioritization concept. We also present the most popular techniques used to prioritize the software project requirements and a compression between these techniques. On the other hand, we spot the light on the importance of involving the non-functional requirements prioritization because of the great effects of non-functional on project success and quality; some approaches that used in prioritize non-functional requirements are discussed in this paper, in addition a general model is proposed based on reviewing the prioritization techniques in order to suggests a best suited technique for specific projects according to decision makers parameters.

RFP based Requirement Prioritization – A One-Step Solution

Every IT companies start off with their project by prioritizing the RFPs received from their client. These requirement prioritization techniques are practiced to diagnose and categorize the momentous requirements that are put forward by each client. Based on this prioritization strategy, the products are delivered to the client on a timely and needy basis. It is found that, IT companies are following and practicing a number of prioritization techniques as it is considered as a decisive stair. These techniques are chosen purely based on the functional and non-functional requirements of the project indicated in the RFPs supplied by the clients. But the real issue arises when more than one technique get overlapped in many situations. RFPs incorporate both functional and non-functional requirements. A software engineer feels jumbled in prioritizing these requirements. But functional requirement becomes obligatory. So, the only confusion is related with categorizing the non-functional requirements such as cost, dependency, time, risk, benefit, value and effort. The categorization of these requirements becomes dubious and challenging for a software engineer since lot of techniques already is in existence. At this stage, a model can be suggested to avoid confusion in prioritizing the requirements without any misperception. Through this paper, I have tried to put forward and expound a model as a solution to this problem which can be thoughtlessly followed in undergoing the procedure of prioritizing these non-functional requirements in a most simple and effectual manner. This solution model considers all the pre mentioned non-functional elements by providing a perfect way to follow and select a suitable technique to conduct requirement prioritization.

Software Requirements Prioritisation: A Systematic Literature Review on Significance, Stakeholders, Techniques and Challenges

As one of the gatekeepers of quality software systems, requirements’ prioritization (RP) is often used to select the most important requirements as perceived by system stakeholders. To date, many RP techniques that adopt various approaches have been proposed in the literature. To identify the strengths, opportunities, and limitations of these existing approaches, this paper studied and analyzed the RP field in terms of its significance in the software development process based on the standard review guidelines by Kitchenham. By a rigorous study selection strategy, 122 relevant studies were selected to address the defined research questions. Findings indicated that RP plays a vital role in ensuring the development of a quality system with defined constraints. The stakeholders involved in RP were reported, and new categories of the participating stakeholders were proposed. Additionally, 108 RP techniques were identified and analyzed with respect to their benefits, prioritization criteria, size of requirements, types in terms of automation level, and their limitations; 84 prioritization criteria were disclosed with their frequency usages in prioritizing the requirements. The study revealed that the existing techniques suffer from serious limitations in terms of scalability, the lack of quantification, and the prioritization of the participating stakeholders, time consumption, requirement interdependences, and the need for highly professional human intervention. These findings are useful for researchers and practitioners in improving the current state of the art and state of practices.

Requirements Prioritization Techniques for Global Software Engineering

<p>Increase in globalization of the industry of software requires an exploration of requirements engineering (RE) in software development institutes at multiple locations. Requirements engineering task is very complicated when it is performed at single site, but it becomes too much complex when stakeholder groups define well-designed requirements under language, time zone and cultural limits. Requirements prioritization (RP) is considered as an imperative part of software requirements engineering in which requirements are ranked to develop best-quality software. In this research, a comparative study of the requirements prioritization techniques was done to overcome the challenges initiated by the corporal distribution of stakeholders within the organization at multiple locations. The objective of this study was to make a comparison between five techniques for prioritizing software requirements and to discuss the results for global software engineering. The selected techniques were Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Cumulative Voting (CV), Value Oriented Prioritization (VOP), Binary Search Tree (BST), and Numerical Assignment Technique (NAT). At the end of the research a framework for Global Software Engineering (GSE) was proposed to prioritize the requirements for stakeholders at distributed locations.<strong></strong></p>

Non-functional Requirement Prioritization Approach

This paper proposes a non-functional requirement prioritization technique where both functional and non-functional requirements are prioritized and that is based on AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) technique employing suitable aspects. The non-functional requirements are further re-prioritized based on their dependency with high priority functional requirements and usage counts. The usage of the proposed method is illustrated with a hypothetical example. The technique is also executed on a case study of the evolving software and the technique resulted in selection of 16 requirements out of 30, yielding considerable reduction in the number of requirements to be implemented. Although the use of the AHP technique may limit the optimization, the use of the numerical assignment technique based on the usage count and dependency count do considerably reduce the number of requirements. The proposed technique prioritizes non-functional requirements independently from functional requirements but they are further selected in terms of their dependencies and usage counts with respect to functional requirements.

The Impact of Analytical Assessment of Requirements Prioritization Models: An Empirical Study

Requirements prioritization is one of the important parts of managing requirements in software development process which plays its role in the success or failure of a software product. A software product can go wrong or fail if right requirements are not prioritized at right time. Thus, there is a need of a vast or complete requirements prioritization technique or model that spans all the factors that must be considered while prioritizing requirements whether it’s for a traditional software development or agile software development. There are several requirements prioritization methodologies that aid in decision making and in prioritizing requirements but importantly many lacks to account the important factors that have significant influence in prioritizing requirements. A requirement prioritization methodology that takes account of important factors such as time and human behavioral factors that has an influence in prioritizing requirements is required. This new model/ technique expected to overcome the lack that is in existing prioritization techniques because of not considering time gap factor and human behavioral factor. Extensive study on literature of agile methodology, requirements elicitation and prioritization has been done to find out factors that influence the decision making process of requirement prioritization. It is found that as agile methodologies such as XP, SCRUM deliver products in increments, there is a time gap between each increment of approximate 4 weeks or more, this time lapse could cause human behavioral to change either because of market demand or any other personal reason and, thus, influences the prioritization decision. These factors could be termed as time factor and human behavioral factors. Thus, a requirement prioritization technique or model is needed that takes account of all such factors while prioritizing requirements whether it’s for a traditional software development or agile software development.

Study of aggregation algorithms for aggregating imprecise software requirements’ priorities

Extensive Numerical Assignment (ENA) is a novel Requirements Prioritization Technique introduced by the authors that acknowledges the uncertain and imprecise nature of human judgment. A controlled experiment is conducted during which data are collected using ENA for the requirements assessment of university website system. The objective of this paper is to study how the imprecise data obtained from ENA can be aggregated using aggregation algorithms: Multiple Attribute Utility Theory (MAUT) and Interval Evidential Reasoning (IER) to generate requirements’ priorities in the presence of conflicting personal preferences among assessors. A simplified version of IER called Laplace Evidential Reasoning (LER) is introduced and the results are discussed. LER has the potential to emerge as a competent aggregation algorithm when compared to MAUT and IER, because of its reasonable processing requirements when compared to IER and its ability to produce rich set of outputs when compared to MAUT.

A Systematic Literature Review on the Limitations and Future Directions of the Existing Requirement Prioritization Techniques

Requirement prioritization are considered crucial towards the development of successful and high quality software. Nowadays, most software development project and people in software industries are confronted with the challenge of implementing a large scale, complex and dynamic software applications. Hence, the need to use a requirement prioritization technique which able to deliver a right set of requirement seems very crucial. The available techniques still suffer from several weaknesses. This motivate us to identify comprehensively what are the limitations and future directions of the existing requirement prioritization techniques. In this study, we conducted an in-depth software engineering based Systematic Literature Review, as it helps to execute a thorough and fair literature review due to its predefined review protocol. We gathered a list of 55 requirement prioritization techniques and investigate the limitation and weaknesses each one of this technique. Findings from this study later will be used to design a new effective and efficient requirement prioritization technique.

Towards the Applied Hybrid Model in Requirements Prioritization

Although there are numerous prioritization techniques, few satisfy the quality criteria such as scalability, efficiency and easiness of usage. This research presents a case study of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software requirements prioritization to be potentially used by thousands of users. The HCV(Hierarchical Cumulative Voting) requirements prioritization technique was addressed and applied through a web questionnaire directly to potential users to analyze the benefit of the requirement criteria. Another aspects discussed were volatility of the requirements and market competition. In the end, eighty respondents sent in the questionnaire and a score of requirements in ratio scale of measurement was obtained, and the criteria have been consolidated through the Macbeth approach. It was found that the method could respond positively to the needs and characteristics of Market-Driven Software Development, in similar situations to those described.

Role of Requirements Elicitation & Prioritization to Optimize Quality in Scrum Agile Development

One of most common aspect with traditional software development is managing requirements. As requirements emerge throughout the software development process and thus are needed to be addressed through proper communication and integration between stakeholders, developers and documentation. Agile methodology is an innovative and iterative process that supports changing requirements and helps in addressing changes throughout the development process. Requirements are elicited at the beginning of every software development process and project (product) and latter are prioritized according to their importance to the market and to the product itself. One of the most important and influencing steps while making a software product is requirements prioritization. Prioritizing requirements helps the software team to understand the existence and importance of a particular requirement, its importance of use and its urgency to time to market. There are many requirements prioritization techniques with their relative strength and weaknesses. Otherwise many of them fail to take account all the factors that must be considered while prioritizing requirements such as cost, value, risk, time to market, number of requirements and effect of non-functional requirements on functional requirements. There are several requirements prioritization methodologies that aid in decision making but importantly many lacks to account the important factors that have significant influence in prioritizing requirements. A requirement prioritization methodology based on several factors such as time to market, cost, risk etc has been proposed. The proposed model is expected to overcome this lack. In sprints, requirements will be prioritized both on the basis of influencing factors such as cost, value, risk, time to market etc. and through the effect of non-functional requirements over functional requirements. This will improve the overall quality of software product when it is included in the development process of scrum. Requirements will not only be prioritized based on sprints, human decision but by critically analyzing the factors (sub characteristics) that can cause the product to success/ fail repeatedly thus ensuring the consistency in right requirements and hence the right prioritized requirements will be selected for a particular sprint at a time.

An Evaluation of Requirement Prioritization Techniques with ANP

This article elaborates an evaluation of seven software requirements prioritization methods (ANP, binary search tree, AHP, hierarchy AHP, spanning tree matrix, priority group and bubble sort). Based on the case study of local project (automation of Mobilink franchise system), the experiment is conducted by students in the Requirement Engineering course in the department of Software Engineering at the University of Science and Technology Bannu, Khyber Pakhtunkhawa, Pakistan. Parameters/ measures used for the experiment are consistency indication, scale of measurement, interdependence, required number of decisions, total time consumption, time consumption per decision, ease of use, reliability of results and fault tolerance; on which requirements prioritization techniques are evaluated. The results of experiment show that ANP is the most successful prioritization methodology among all the available prioritization methodologies.

Comparison of Requirement Prioritization Techniques to Find Best Prioritization Technique

This paper describes an assessment of different requirement prioritization techniques (binary search tree, AHP, hierarchy AHP, spanning tree matrix, priority group/Numerical Analysis, bubble sort, MoSoW, simple ranking and Planning Game) on the basis of previous literature. Five research papers and thesis are critically reviewed, in order to select best requirement prioritization method. The study of literature shows that AHP is the best requirements prioritization technique amongst all the requirements prioritization techniques. It provides the most efficient and reliable results which are on ratio scale. It is faulttolerant and provides a consistency check.

Investigating the penalty reward calculus of software users and its impact on requirements prioritization

ContextThe current requirements engineering techniques for prioritization of software requirements implicitly assume that each user requirement will have an independent and symmetric impact on user satisfaction. For example, it is assumed that implementing a high priority user requirement will positively impact his satisfaction and not implementing a high priority user requirement will negatively impact his satisfaction. Further, the impacts of implementing multiple user requirements on his satisfaction are expected to be additive. But is this always the case? ObjectiveThis paper empirically examines whether the assumptions of symmetric and multiplicative impacts of user requirements on his satisfaction are valid. Further, the study assesses the relative efficacy of 5 methods of requirements prioritization in managing these effects as reflected by the user satisfaction with the prioritized requirement sets. MethodTo test for existence and mitigation of asymmetric effects an adaptation of the widely accepted PRCA (Penalty Reward Contrast Analysis) method was used for 5 requirements prioritization techniques. To test for existence and mitigation of multiplicative effects MHMR (Moderated Hierarchical Multiple Regression) a well-accepted technique for testing interaction effects was used. ResultsBoth asymmetric and multiplicative effects of software requirements on user satisfaction were observed for requirements prioritized using all 5 requirements prioritization methods raising questions about the efficacy of present day requirements prioritization techniques. Further, the results of the experiment led to proposing a new method for requirements prioritization for managing these effects. ConclusionThe study empirically demonstrates the complexities of prioritizing software requirements and calls for a new generation of methods to address them. Understanding and resolving these complexities will enable software providers to conserve resources by enabling them to parsimoniously selecting only those requirements for implementation in the software product that have maximum incremental impact on user satisfaction.

PHandler: An expert system for a scalable software requirements prioritization process

Software requirements engineering is a critical discipline in the software development life cycle. The major problem in software development is the selection and prioritization of the requirements in order to develop a system of high quality. This research analyzes the issues associated with existing software requirement prioritization techniques. One of the major issues in software requirement prioritization is that the existing techniques handle only toy projects or software projects with very few requirements. The current techniques are not suitable for the prioritization of a large number of requirements in projects where requirements may grow to the hundreds or even thousands. The research paper proposes an expert system, called the Priority Handler (PHandler), for requirement prioritization. PHandler is based on the value-based intelligent requirement prioritization technique, neural network and analytical hierarchical process in order to make the requirement prioritization process scalable. The back-propagation neural network is used to predict the value of a requirement in order to reduce the extent of expert biases and make the PHandler efficient. Moreover, the analytical hierarchy process is applied on prioritized groups of requirements in order to enhance the scalability of the requirement prioritization process.

A Proposed Process Model for Requirements Engineering using Delphi Techniques for Prioritisation

Requirements engineering (RE) addresses the first software development step and lays the foundation for a successful system. Consequently, ability to identify problems and suggestions for improvements in the RE process opens up significant potential for increasing the success of software projects. Since RE process is naturally collaborative in nature, the intensiveness from both knowledge and human perspectives opens up the problem of decision making on requirements that can be facilitated by requirements prioritisation. In this regard, the paper opined the need for requirements prioritization techniques that will help the developers to obtain consensus among stakeholders using a suitable technique. In particular, the paper proposed a RE process model using Delphi technique. The Delphi technique was suggested in this paper to facilitate and enhance the process of requirements prioritisation in a multilevel prioritisation dimension. Therefore, the proposed model on implementation will contribute to the formulation of an interactive framework for requirements prioritisation to produce a requirement ordering which complies with the existing priorities.

A Novel Approach to Select an Appropriate Requirements Prioritization Technique

Requirements prioritization has been recognized as a critical and essential but challenging activity for product development. The pressure on time-to-market and being able to plan for successive release of the software product has posed many challenges to the software engineering process. Budgetary restrictions and time-tomarket deadline often compel stakeholders to cautiously prioritize requirements. Various requirements prioritization methods are available in literature, but generally practices in companies are found to be informal. This paper evaluates various requirements prioritization methods with different characteristics and proposes a novel technique to select an appropriate method for the application. The aim of our work is to offer a method to guide the engineer through various characteristics such as ease to use, size of project, number of decisions etc. for an application. This approach is illustrated with a case study of the Travel Management Planning Website.

Comparison of requirements prioritization techniques employing different scales of measurement

The objective of this paper is to conduct a controlled experiment with the three requirements prioritization techniques: Numerical Assignment (NA), Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Extensive Numerical Assignment (ENA), each based on ordinal, ratio and interval scales respectively. NA and AHP are widely used traditional requirements prioritization techniques. ENA is a novel technique introduced by the authors, which acknowledges the uncertain and incomplete nature of human judgment about requirements priorities, which are in turn uncertain guesses about the upcoming product. The aim of the experiment is to examine the three techniques using various objective and subjective measures like number of decisions, time consumption, ease of use, attractiveness, scalability and reprioritizability. The experiment was executed by prioritizing the requirements of a university website system with students as participants in the experiment. The results of the experiment proved that ENA transcends NA and AHP.

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.