Toward collisions produced in requirements rankings: A qualitative approach and experimental study

Abstract

Requirements prioritization is an important issue that determines the way requirements are selected and processed in software projects. There already exist specific methods to classify and prioritize requirements, most of them based on quantitative measures. However, most of existing approaches do not consider collisions, which are an important concern in large-scale requirements sets and, more specifically, in agile development processes where requirements have to be uniquely selected for each software increment. In this paper, we propose QMPSR (Qualitative Method for Prioritizing Software Requirements), an approach that features the prioritization of requirements by considering qualitative elements that are related to the project's priorities. Our approach highlights a prioritization method that has proven to reduce collisions in software requirements rankings. Furthermore, QMPSR improves accuracy in classification when facing large-scale requirements sets, featuring no scalability problems as the number of requirements increases. We formally introduce QMPSR and then define prioritization effort and collision metrics to carry out comprehensive experiments involving different sets of requirements, comparing our approach with well-known existing prioritization methods. The experiments have provided satisfactory results, overcoming existing approaches and ensuring scalability.

Enhancing decision-making in user-centered web development: a methodology for card-sorting analysis

“…Since card sorting is easy to design and implement, it has become a common research practice in user experience and design thinking, among other fields [30]. It is one of the most suitable ways to elicit requirements in the early phases of web-based user-centered projects [75,76], but it can also be used as an evaluation technique to test and refine advanced design solutions.…”

OurRank: A Software Requirements Prioritization Method Based on Qualitative Assessment and Cost-Benefit Prediction

“…Recently proposed, the Qualitative Method for Prioritizing Software Requirements (QMPSR) [6] allows considering qualitative elements related to project priorities. However, this proposal only considers elements associated with the estimation of benefits (positive aspects of the project), without considering its costs or negative aspects, making it difficult to fully understand the priorities of the projects.…”

“…In this step, the importance level of the requirements is determined. The relevance of a requirement is related to the priorities of the elements of the associated aspect plus an Association Factor (G) [6]. This G allows to prioritize elements that have more related requirements, and it can be used to compare and analyze elements with the same priority.…”

“…Methods that only capture and process quantitative information make it difficult to reify interests and perspectives of decision-makers, which are of qualitative nature. Even though methods that include qualitative information to dynamically drive the prioritization process exist [5], [6], these only consider qualitative prioritization criteria associated with estimated benefits, thus costs and other aspects with negative connotation fail to be considered as prioritization criteria [6]. Furthermore, cost prioritization criteria should be modelled after stakeholders' qualitative knowledge, and should be considered alongside benefit-related criteria in requirements prioritization [7].…”

“…It must be noted that other prioritization methods do not formally integrate nor combine decisionmakers' prior knowledge in the prioritization process. In this research a novel software requirements prioritization method is proposed, which, being based on previous research, seeks to overcome the limitations of current methods discussed above [6], [8], [9]. The main contributions of this work are the following: --A qualitative method for requirements prioritization called OurRank is presented.…”