Role of Requirements Elicitation & Prioritization to Optimize Quality in Scrum Agile Development

Abstract

One of most common aspect with traditional software development is managing requirements. As requirements emerge throughout the software development process and thus are needed to be addressed through proper communication and integration between stakeholders, developers and documentation. Agile methodology is an innovative and iterative process that supports changing requirements and helps in addressing changes throughout the development process. Requirements are elicited at the beginning of every software development process and project (product) and latter are prioritized according to their importance to the market and to the product itself. One of the most important and influencing steps while making a software product is requirements prioritization. Prioritizing requirements helps the software team to understand the existence and importance of a particular requirement, its importance of use and its urgency to time to market. There are many requirements prioritization techniques with their relative strength and weaknesses. Otherwise many of them fail to take account all the factors that must be considered while prioritizing requirements such as cost, value, risk, time to market, number of requirements and effect of non-functional requirements on functional requirements. There are several requirements prioritization methodologies that aid in decision making but importantly many lacks to account the important factors that have significant influence in prioritizing requirements. A requirement prioritization methodology based on several factors such as time to market, cost, risk etc has been proposed. The proposed model is expected to overcome this lack. In sprints, requirements will be prioritized both on the basis of influencing factors such as cost, value, risk, time to market etc. and through the effect of non-functional requirements over functional requirements. This will improve the overall quality of software product when it is included in the development process of scrum. Requirements will not only be prioritized based on sprints, human decision but by critically analyzing the factors (sub characteristics) that can cause the product to success/ fail repeatedly thus ensuring the consistency in right requirements and hence the right prioritized requirements will be selected for a particular sprint at a time.