Requirements Prioritization Techniques for Global Software Engineering

Abstract

Increase in globalization of the industry of software requires an exploration of requirements engineering (RE) in software development institutes at multiple locations. Requirements engineering task is very complicated when it is performed at single site, but it becomes too much complex when stakeholder groups define well-designed requirements under language, time zone and cultural limits. Requirements prioritization (RP) is considered as an imperative part of software requirements engineering in which requirements are ranked to develop best-quality software. In this research, a comparative study of the requirements prioritization techniques was done to overcome the challenges initiated by the corporal distribution of stakeholders within the organization at multiple locations. The objective of this study was to make a comparison between five techniques for prioritizing software requirements and to discuss the results for global software engineering. The selected techniques were Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), Cumulative Voting (CV), Value Oriented Prioritization (VOP), Binary Search Tree (BST), and Numerical Assignment Technique (NAT). At the end of the research a framework for Global Software Engineering (GSE) was proposed to prioritize the requirements for stakeholders at distributed locations.