Choosing a Suitable Requirement Prioritization Method: A Survey

Abstract

Software requirements prioritization plays a crucial role in software development. It can be viewed as the process of ordering requirements by determining which requirements must be done first and which can be done later. Powerful requirements prioritization techniques are of paramount importance to finish the implementation on time and within budget. Many factors affect requirement prioritization such as stakeholder expectations, complexity, dependency, scalability, risk, and cost. Therefore, finding the proper order of requirements is a challenging process. Hence, different types of requirements prioritization techniques have been developed to support this task. In this survey, we propose a novel classification that can classify the prioritization techniques under two major classes: relative and exact prioritization techniques class, where each class is divided into two subclasses. We depend in our classification on the way the value of ranking is given to the requirement, either explicitly as a specific value in the case of the exact prioritization techniques class, or implicitly in the case of the Relative prioritization technique class. An overview of fifteen different requirements prioritization techniques are presented and organized according to the proposed classification criteria's. Moreover, we make a comparison between methods that are related to the same subclass to analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Based on the comparison results, the properties for each proposed subclass of techniques are identified. Depending on these properties, we present some recommendations to help project managers in the process of selecting the most suitable technique to prioritize requirements based on their project characteristics (number of requirements, time, cost, and accuracy).