A Hybrid Method for Prioritizing Software Requirements in terms of Use Cases

Requirement prioritization of software products is a key factor to their successes. Most of existing methods for prioritizing software requirements put particular emphasis on their value, cost, risk, etc., and only a few of them take the dependencies among requirements into account. In this paper, we proposed a two-step hybrid method in consideration of both dependency structure and requirement value. Based on a new metric that measures mutual influence of nodes in a local region, the first step is importance-based node ranking in a directed use case network, where each node represents a use case and each directed edge indicates a relationship between use cases. For those nodes with the same value of topological potential, the second step is elaborate prioritization based on requirement value by using existing methods such as the Analytic Hierarchy Process. Eventually, a case study of our selfdeveloped commercial software system is shown to demonstrate the validity of our approach, which would be a sound complement to traditional requirement prioritization methods within the community of requirements engineering.

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