Towards Utility-based Prioritization of Requirements in Open Source Environments

TL;DR

This paper explores utility-based prioritization methods to help open source contributors identify the most relevant requirements efficiently, considering dependencies, with a focus on environments like Bugzilla.

Contribution

It introduces a utility-based prioritization approach tailored for open source requirements engineering, incorporating dependency considerations, which is novel compared to traditional methods.

Findings

Utility-based prioritization supports open source contributors effectively.

Dependencies can be integrated into prioritization processes.

Approach demonstrated using Bugzilla environment.

Abstract

Requirements Engineering in open source projects such as Eclipse faces the challenge of having to prioritize requirements for individual contributors in a more or less unobtrusive fashion. In contrast to conventional industrial software development projects, contributors in open source platforms can decide on their own which requirements to implement next. In this context, the main role of prioritization is to support contributors in figuring out the most relevant and interesting requirements to be implemented next and thus avoid time-consuming and inefficient search processes. In this paper, we show how utility-based prioritization approaches can be used to support contributors in conventional as well as in open source Requirements Engineering scenarios. As an example of an open source environment, we use Bugzilla. In this context, we also show how dependencies can be taken into account in utility-based prioritization processes.