Uncertainty and Dependency-wise Requirements Prioritization

With the increase of complexity in software systems, optimizing the requirements management has become an important task in Software Engineering. The selection and prioritization of software requirements among plenty of requirements for each release of a software is a common problem. Several methods have been introduced to solve this common problem. Literature shows that the majority of existing requirement prioritization (RP) approaches ignore fundamental factors such as uncertainty in cost and interdependency between requirements. The objective of this paper is to present an approach to solve the RP problem that considers, with other commonly utilized factors, uncertainty and interdependences between requirements.

I. Introduction

The requirements elicitation phase is considered the most important phase of the Software Development Life Cycle [1], where requirements for a software project are collected and then managed before design and implementation. With the increase of customers' expectations and the limitation of resources, it has become an important task in Software Engineering (SE). This phase is an early step to ensure the successful creation of the required software project. If executed effectively, it is expected to result in reducing software errors from an early stage of the life cycle [2] as well as making the proper use of resources.