RePizer: a framework for prioritization of software requirements

Abstract

The standard software development life cycle heavily depends on requirements elicited from stakeholders. Based on those requirements, software development is planned and managed from its inception phase to closure. Due to time and resource constraints, it is imperative to identify the high-priority requirements that need to be considered first during the software development process. Moreover, existing prioritization frameworks lack a store of historical data useful for selecting the most suitable prioritization technique of any similar project domain. In this paper, we propose a framework for prioritization of software requirements, called RePizer, to be used in conjunction with a selected prioritization technique to rank software requirements based on defined criteria such as implementation cost. RePizer assists requirements engineers in a decision-making process by retrieving historical data from a requirements repository. RePizer also provides a panoramic view of the entire project to ensure the judicious use of software development resources. We compared the performance of RePizer in terms of expected accuracy and ease of use while separately adopting two different prioritization techniques, planning game (PG) and analytical hierarchy process (AHP). The results showed that RePizer performed better when used in conjunction with the PG technique.