Understanding requirements prioritisation: literature survey and critical evaluation

Abstract

Requirements prioritisation deals with the ranking or classification of user requirements based on their importance. This process is central to releasing a software product with features most favoured by users. While studies have explored the efforts that are dedicated to this cause, these tend to focus on a subset of the solutions that are available in the software engineering domain. Current techniques investigated in the software engineering domain do not consider the strengths inherent in requirements prioritisation techniques developed in other disciplines (e.g. product manufacturing), a gap that should be addressed. The authors thus conducted a comprehensive systematic mapping study and critical evaluation of studies that have provided implementations of requirements prioritisation techniques across multiple disciplines (including software engineering, product manufacturing, and engineering). Among their findings, they observed that while many solutions are targeted, quite often researchers have proposed solutions that were not evaluated. Most solutions were only validated as being operational, and the attributes studied had limited effects on performance outcomes. Their evidence suggests that new techniques may address the requirements prioritisation challenge if they are inspired by hybrid approaches developed across multiple disciplines. In addition, performance trade‐offs are to be expected of such techniques, depending on their performance targets.

An Approach Based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets for Considering Stakeholders’ Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction, and Hesitation in Software Features Prioritization

“…Furthermore, we underscore the importance of the practical applicability of any scientific approach, a sentiment echoed by [30] in the context of static software analysis tools, stating that "sophisticated analysis is not easy to explain or redo manually." In a recent survey on software requirements prioritization [31], the observation is made that "Some 158 different techniques were researched by those studying requirements prioritization, with AHP featuring most prominently; most solutions were only validated as being operational." This highlights a lack of empirical evidence partially stemming from challenges in the practical applicability of many prioritization methods.…”