Prioritization of Software Functional Requirements: A Novel Approach using AHP and Spanning Tree

Abstract

Requirements prioritization is an important activity conducted during requirements management phase of requirement engineering. Prioritization of requirements is necessary to include certain features in software while exclude unnecessary requirements. Similarly for developers of software project, prioritization of requirements is also important. Prioritization of small size requirements is easy but difficult process when deal with large size requirements due to time complexity of prioritization technique. AHP (Analytic hierarchy process) is an efficient technique which has been used from several years by many authors. AHP is simple in use and yield accurate results but one of difficulty with AHP is too much comparisons that make is difficult to use for large size requirements. In this research study, an improved AHP technique is designed to diminish number of comparisons and time complexity of AHP with spanning tree based approach. Reducing total comparisons with AHP will make it more suitable to prioritize large size software requirements.