Criteria-based requirements prioritization for software product management

Abstract

Meeting stakeholders requirements and expectations becomes one of the critical aspects on which any software organization in market-driven environment focus on, and pays a lot of efforts and expenses to maximize the satisfaction of their stakeholders. Therefore identifying the software product release contents becomes one of the critical decisions for software product success. Requirements prioritization refers to that activity through which product releases contents that maximize stakeholder satisfaction can be identified. This makes it one of the most important component of software requirement decision support in incremental software development [8]. This paper illustrates the Criteria-Based requirement prioritization approach for software product management. The technique proposed on this paper designed based on the Hierarchical Cumulative Voting (HCV) and Value-Oriented Prioritization (VOP) techniques. The proposed technique, Value-Oriented HCV (VOHCV) can select the best candidate requirements for each release based on the stakeholders input values for each requirement. These values reflect the importance of each requirement in terms of associated anticipated cost, technical risk, relative impact, market-related aspects and perceived value to the stakeholder. The VOHCV inherits the strengths of the HCV and VOP techniques. It also provides a mechanism that takes different stakeholders' aspects into account while selecting the best candidate release requirement, to maximize stakeholders' value and satisfaction [11].