Using Social Network and Fuzzy Set Theory for Elicitation and Prioritization of Software Requirements

Abstract

Stakeholders’ identification is one of the key activities of the software requirements elicitation process. In real-life applications, various stakeholders participate during the software development process and the information about these stakeholders is stored using social networks which can be used to identify the key stakeholders. Based on our review, we found that requirements elicitation and prioritization methods do not support the following: (a) social network-based approach for the analysis of the large set of stakeholders before the starting of the requirements elicitation process (b) dealing with imprecision and vagueness during the recommendation of stakeholders by other stakeholders so that large set of software requirements can be elicited and selected based on the ranking values. Therefore, to address these issues, this paper presents a method for software requirements elicitation and prioritization in which social network has been used to identify and analyze the key stakeholders and a fuzzy based method is applied for prioritizing the large set of software requirements. Finally, the applicability of the proposed method is discussed with the help of the software requirements of an institute examination system.