Improving Software Requirements Prioritization through the Lens of Constraint Solving

TL;DR

This paper introduces an interactive requirements prioritization method that combines pairwise comparisons with constraint solving to improve accuracy and robustness in early software development.

Contribution

It presents a novel approach integrating constraint solving with interactive pairwise comparisons for requirements prioritization, outperforming existing methods.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art methods in effectiveness

More robust to analyst errors

Validated on real healthcare project data

Abstract

Requirements prioritization is a critical activity during the early software development process, which produces a set of key requirements to implement. The prioritization process offers a parity among the requirements based on multiple characteristics, including end-users' preferences, cost to implement, and technical dependencies. This paper presents an interactive method to requirements prioritization that leverages the pairwise comparisons and a constraint solver. Our method employs an interactive accumulation of knowledge from the requirements analyst when the relative priority among the requirements cannot be determined based on the existing knowledge from the requirements documents. The final ranking of the requirements is produced via the constraint solver and interactive pairwise comparisons. We evaluate the proposed method using the requirements from a real healthcare project. The proposed prioritization method relying on a constraint solver outperforms state-of-the-art interactive prioritization methods in terms of effectiveness and robustness to analyst's errors.