Value Based Prioritization of Requirements in Software Engineering Education

Both physical and software products have a functional use for which they were designed. Putting a new project idea into action necessitates a clear, holistic vision of the expected gain and costs. However, gain (or value) can have many different manifestations that often go far beyond pure functionality. For one thing, it can be about purely monetary value, but it can also be about expanding the company’s reach, improving customer loyalty, displacing competitors, or generating other additional benefits for the company or the user. Cost and Value Engineering is a promising approach for addressing such a value-centered perspective without losing sight of expenses. In typical Software Engineering courses Software Engineering students learn how to deal with requirements in general, as well as user stories, epics, and other requirements artifacts in the context of agile software development projects. However, aside from rudimentary planning activities for user stories or epics, they rarely learn to apply good value prioritization techniques. The primary goal of this paper is to present a validation experiment for two cost and value engineering methods in order to determine whether these methods are appropriate and valuable in a student context. The results are promising, indicating that these methods should be used in software engineering courses on a regular basis. In order for these methodologies to be properly incorporated into Software Engineering courses, an integrated tool support is required.