The Impact of Analytical Assessment of Requirements Prioritization Models: An Empirical Study

Abstract

Requirements prioritization is one of the important parts of managing requirements in software development process which plays its role in the success or failure of a software product. A software product can go wrong or fail if right requirements are not prioritized at right time. Thus, there is a need of a vast or complete requirements prioritization technique or model that spans all the factors that must be considered while prioritizing requirements whether it’s for a traditional software development or agile software development. There are several requirements prioritization methodologies that aid in decision making and in prioritizing requirements but importantly many lacks to account the important factors that have significant influence in prioritizing requirements. A requirement prioritization methodology that takes account of important factors such as time and human behavioral factors that has an influence in prioritizing requirements is required. This new model/ technique expected to overcome the lack that is in existing prioritization techniques because of not considering time gap factor and human behavioral factor. Extensive study on literature of agile methodology, requirements elicitation and prioritization has been done to find out factors that influence the decision making process of requirement prioritization. It is found that as agile methodologies such as XP, SCRUM deliver products in increments, there is a time gap between each increment of approximate 4 weeks or more, this time lapse could cause human behavioral to change either because of market demand or any other personal reason and, thus, influences the prioritization decision. These factors could be termed as time factor and human behavioral factors. Thus, a requirement prioritization technique or model is needed that takes account of all such factors while prioritizing requirements whether it’s for a traditional software development or agile software development.