Eliciting Stakeholder Preferences for Requirements Prioritization

Requirements engineering is a very critical phase in software development process. Requirements can be interpreted as basic decision alternatives which have to be negotiated by stakeholders. In this paper we present the results of an empirical study which focused on the analysis of key influence factors of successful requirements prioritization. This study has been conducted within the scope of software development projects at our university where development teams interacted with a requirements prioritization environment. The major result of our study is that anonymized preference elicitation can help to significantly improve the quality of requirements prioritization, for example, in terms of the degree of team consensus, prioritization diversity, and quality of the resulting software components.

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