A Systematic Review of Software Requirements Prioritization

Software engineering research has been, and still is criticised as being immature and unscientific due to lack of evaluation. However, software engineering community is now focusing more on empirical research and there is a movement to adopt approaches from other mature fields like medical science and one such approach is Systematic Reviews. One of the major activities within the requirements engineering process is to use requirements prioritization that helps to focus on the most important requirements. There are many prioritization techniques available to prioritize software requirements; still there is lack of evidence of which technique to prefer. The reasons could be the differences in contexts, measurement of variables and usage of data sets. In this thesis, the area of requirements prioritization has been systematically reviewed in order to assess what evidence regarding different prioritisation techniques exist. The results from different studies are contradictory in nature due to variations in study designs, research methodologies and choice of different dependent and context variables. Based on the results of the systematic review, a research framework has been proposed to provide the researchers with a common background for further research with in requirements prioritization area. The goal of the framework is to develop reliable knowledge base as well as help researchers conduct and report prioritization studies.

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