An Evaluation of Software Requirement Prioritization Techniques

Abstract — Requirements prioritization plays an important role in the requirement engineering process, particularly, with respect to critical tasks like requirements negotiation and software release planning. Selecting the right set of requirements for a product release largely depends on how successfully the requirement candidates are prioritized. There are different requirement prioritization techniques available which are some more elaborated than others. This paper takes a closer look at nine different techniques of requirement prioritization namely Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), Hierarchy AHP, Minimal Spanning Tree, Bubble Sort, Binary Search Tree (BST), Priority Group, Planning Game (PG), 100 points method and Planning Game combined with AHP (PGcAHP) and then put them into a controlled experiment, in order to find out the best one. The evaluation was done on the basis of some criteria like: ease of use, certainty, accuracy of result, method’s ability to scale up to many more requirements, required number of comparisons, and required time to make decision. Analysis of the data from the experiment indicates that the analytic hierarchy process to be a promising candidate, although it may be problematic to scale-up. However, the result clearly indicates that the Planning Game (PG) yields accurate result, is able to scale up, requires least amount of time, the easiest method to use and so on. For these reasons, finding of the experiment is, the Planning Game (PG) method is supposed to be the best method for prioritizing requirements.

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