Abstract
This chapter provides an overview of techniques for prioritization of requirements for software products. Prioritization is a crucial step towards making good decisions regarding product planning for single and multiple releases. Various aspects of functionality are considered, such as importance, risk, cost, etc. Prioritization decisions are made by stakeholders, including users, managers, developers, or their representatives. Methods are for combining individual prioritizations based on overall objectives and constraints. A range of different techniques and aspects are applied to an example to illustrate their use. Finally, limitations and shortcomings of current methods are pointed out, and open research questions in the area of requirements prioritization are discussed.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
References
Aurum A, Wohlin C (2003) The fundamental nature of requirements engineering activities as a decision-making process. Information and Software Technology 45(14): 945–954
Beck K (1999) Extreme programming explained. Addison-Wesley, Upper Saddle River
Berander P, Wohlin C (2004) Differences in views between development roles in software process improvement — A quantitative comparison. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Empirical Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE 2004). IEE, Stevenage, pp.57–66
Berander P (2004) Using students as subjects in requirements prioritization. In: Proceedings of the 2004 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE’04). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, pp.167–176
Boehm BW (1981) Software engineering economics. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs
Boehm BW, Ross R (1989) Theory-W software project management: Principles and examples. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 15(7):902–916
Bergman B, Klefsjö B (2003) Quality from customer needs to customer satisfaction. Published by Studentlitteratur AB, Lund, Sweden
Bradner S (1997) RFC 2119. http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt (24 November 2004)
Bray IK (2002) An introduction to requirements engineering. Pearson Education, London
Brooks FP (1995) The mythical man-month: Essays on software engineering. Addison-Wesley Longman, Boston
Carlshamre P (2001) A usability perspective on requirements engineering — From methodology to product development. Ph.D. thesis, Linköping Institute of Technology, Sweden
Carlshamre P, Sandahl K, Lindvall M, Regnell B, Natt och Dag J (2001) An industrial survey of requirements interdependencies in software release planning. In: Proceedings of the 5th IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering (RE’01). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, pp 84–91
Carlshamre P (2002) Release planning in market-driven software product development: provoking an understanding requirements engineering 7(3):139–151
Clements P, Northrop L (2002) Software product lines — Practices and patterns. Addison-Wesley, Upper Saddle River
Colombo E, Francalanci C (2004) Selecting CRM packages based on architectural, functional, and cost requirements: Empirical validation of a hierarchical ranking model. Requirements Engineering 9(3):186–203
Dahlstedt Å, Persson A (2003) Requirements interdependencies — Molding the state of research into a research agenda. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ’03). Universität Duisburg-Essen, Essen, pp. 71–80
Davis AM (2003) The art of requirements triage. IEEE Computer 36(3):42–49
Ecklund EF, Delcambre LML, Freiling MJ (1996) Change cases: Use cases that identify future requirements. In: Proceedings of the 11th ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA’96). ACM, USA, pp. 342–358
Feather MS, Menzies T (2002) Converging on the optimal attainment of requirements. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Joint International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE’02). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, pp. 263–270
Fenton, NE, Pfleeger SL (1997) Software metrics — A rigorous and practical approach, 2nd Edition. PWS Publishing Company, Boston
Gallis H, Arisholm E, Dybå T (2003) An initial framework for research on pair programming. In: Proceedings of the 2003 International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering (ISESE’03). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, pp.132–142
Giesen, J, Völker A (2002) Requirements interdependencies and stakeholders preferences. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Joint International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE’02). IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, pp.206–209
Gorschek T (2004) Software process assessment & improvement in industrial requirements engineering. Licentiate Thesis, Blekinge Institute of Technology
Greer D, Ruhe G (2004) Software release planning: An evolutionary and iterative approach. Information and Software Technology 46(4): 243–253
Grudin J, Pruitt J (2002) Personas, participatory design and product development: An infrastructure for engagement. Participation and Design Conference (PDC2002), Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, Palo Alto, pp.144–161
Harker PT (1987) Incomplete pairwise comparisons in the analytic hierarchy process. Mathematical Modeling 9(11): 837–848
Hill N, Brierly J, MacDougall R (1999) How to measure customer satisfaction. Gower Publishing, Hampshire
Humphrey WS (1989) Managing the software process. Addison-Wesley, USA
IEEE Std 830-1998 (1998) IEEE recommended practice for software requirements specifications. IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos
Karlsson J, Ryan K (1997) A cost-value approach for prioritizing requirements. IEEE Software 14(5): 67–74
Karlsson J, Olsson S, Ryan K (1997) Improved practical support for large-scale requirements prioritizing. Requirements Engineering 2(1): 51–60
Karlsson J (1998) A systematic approach for prioritizing software requirements. Ph.D. Thesis, Linköping Institute of Technology
Karlsson J, Wohlin C, Regnell B (1998) An evaluation of methods for prioritizing software requirements. Information and Software Technology 39(14–15): 939–947
Karlsson L, Berander P, Regnell B, Wohlin C (2004) Requirements prioritisation: An experiment on exhaustive pair-wise comparisons versus planning game partitioning. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Empirical Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE 2004). IEE, Stevenage, pp.145–154
Kotler P, Armstron G, Saunders J, Wong V (2002) Principles of marketing, 3rd European Edition. Pearson Education, Essex
Lausen S (2002) Software requirements — styles and techniques. Pearson Education, Essex
Leffingwell D, Widrig D (2000) Managing software requirements — A unified approach. Addison-Wesley, Upper Saddle River
Lehtola L, Kauppinen M, Kujala S (2004) Requirements prioritization challenges in practice. In: Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Product Focused Software Process Improvement, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (vol. 3009), Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, pp.497–508
Lehtola L, Kauppinen M (2004) Empirical evaluation of two requirements prioritization methods in product development projects. In: Proceedings of the European Software Process Improvement Conference (EuroSPI 2004), Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg, pp.161–170
Lubars M, Potts C, Richter C (1993) A review of the state of practice in requirements modeling. In: Proceedings of IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, Los Alamitos, pp.2–14
Maciaszek LA (2001) Requirements analysis and system design — Developing information systems with UML. Addison Wesley, London
Maiden NAM, Ncube C (1998) Acquiring COTS software selection requirements. IEEE Software 15(2):46–56
Moore G (1991) Crossing the chasm. HarperCollins, New York
Nicholas JM (2001) Project management for business and technology: Principles and Practice. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River
Regnell B, Höst M, Natt och Dag J, Beremark P, Hjelm T (2001) An industrial case study on distributed prioritization in market-driven requirements engineering for packaged software. Requirements Engineering 6(1):51–62
Regnell B, Paech B, Aurum A, Wohlin C, Dutoit A, Natt och Dag J (2001) Requirements mean decisions! — Research issues for understanding and supporting decision-making in requirements engineering. In: Proceedings of 1st Swedish Conference on Software Engineering Research and Practise (SERP’01). Blekinge Institute of Technology, Ronneby, pp. 49–52
Robertson S, Robertson J (1999) Mastering the requirements process. ACM Press, London
Ruhe G, Eberlein A, Pfahl D (2002) Quantitative WinWin — A new method for decision support in requirements negotiation. In: Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering (SEKE’02), ACM Press, New York, pp. 159–166
Ruhe G (2003) Software engineering decision support — A new paradigm for learning software organizations. Advances in learning software organization, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, Vol. 2640, pp.104–115
Ruhe G, Eberlein A, Pfahl D (2003) Trade-off analysis for requirements selection. International journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering 13(4): 345–366
Saaty TL (1980) The analytic hierarchy process. McGraw-Hill, New York
Saaty TL, Vargas LG (2001) Models, methods, concepts & applications of the analytic hierarchy process. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Norwell
Schulmeyer GG, McManus JI (1999) Handbook of software quality assurance, 3rd Edition. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River
Shen Y, Hoerl AE, McConnell W (1992) An incomplete design in the analytical hierarchy process. Mathematical computer modeling 16(5):121–129
Sommerville I, Sawyer P (1997) Requirements engineering — A good practice guide. John Wiley and Sons, Chichester
Sommerville I (2001) Software engineering, 6th Edition. Pearson Education, London
Wiegers K (1999) Software requirements. Microsoft Press, Redmond
Yeh AC (1992) REQUirements engineering support technique (REQUEST) — A market driven requirements management process. In: Proceedings of 2nd Symposium of Quality Software Development Tools. IEEE Computer Society, Piscataway, pp.211–223
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Berander, P., Andrews, A. (2005). Requirements Prioritization. In: Aurum, A., Wohlin, C. (eds) Engineering and Managing Software Requirements. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-28244-0_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-28244-0_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-25043-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-28244-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)