Requirements interaction in the next release problem

The selection of a set of requirements between all those proposed by the customers is an important process in software development, that can be addressed using heuristic optimization techniques. Dependencies or interactions between requirements can be defined to denote common situations in software development: requirements that follow an order of precedence, requiments exclusive of each other, requirements that must be included at the same time, etc. This paper shows how requirements interactions affect the search space explored by optimization algorithms. Three search techniques, i.e. a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure (GRASP), a genetic algorithm (GA) and an ant colony system (ACS), have been adapted to the requirements selection problem considering interaction between requirements. We describe the adaptation of the three meta-heuristic algorithms to solve this problem and compare their performance.