Requirements interdependencies and stakeholders preferences

A major challenge in requirements engineering is to analyze the stakeholders preferences. Software projects are usually described by a large set of attributes. By varying the values of these attributes, the project could potentially be realized in various different ways. The attributes have to be chosen in order to meet the stakeholders' expectations. Therefore one needs to know the utility of a given project realization as perceived by the stakeholders. Here we introduce a well established technique from marketing research to obtain individual utility functions for each stakeholder. These functions also provide a natural way to deal with attribute interdependencies.