A preference weights model for prioritizing software requirements

Abstract

Software requirements prioritization is the act of ranking user’s requirements in order to plan for release phases. The essence of prioritizing requirements is to avoid breach of contract, trust or agreement during software development process. This is crucial because, not all the specified requirements could be implemented in a single release due to inadequate skilled programmers, time, budget, and schedule constraints. Major limitations of existing prioritization techniques are rank reversals, scalability, ease of use, computational complexities and accuracy among others. Consequently, an innovative model that is capable of addressing these problems is presented. To achieve our aim, synthesized weights are computed for criteria that make up requirements and functions were defined to display prioritized requirements based on the global weights of attributes across project stakeholders. An empirical case scenario is described to illustrate the adaptability processes of the proposed approach.