Integrated requirement prioritization model for open source software

Abstract

Requirements elicitation is a process of understanding, finding, extracting, evolving and discovering needs of stakeholders. One of the important requirements elicitation activities is requirements prioritization. To develop quality software it is necessary to select right requirements from a set of requirements. Due to the distributed nature of open source software (OSS) requirements, prioritization is very important. Existing prioritization techniques used in OSS categorize requirements into groups such as: mandatory, desirable and inessential, assigning scores to requirements from 1 to 9, and assigning relative values to requirements. Hazardous flaws of existing schemes are: In grouping model stakeholders consider that everything is important, so put each requirement in mandatory group or assign highest score to it. Requirements having same priorities (or group) is another problem of Analytical Hierarchal Process (AHP) and grouping schemes, because in case of same priority (group), reprioritization/scheduling needs to be done. In AHP when number of requirements raise, the number of comparison increases with the magnitude of O(n2), which make the prioritization process complicated. Thus alternate approach is required to tackle these problems. This research study proposes an Integrated Requirements Prioritization Model (IRPM) that will integrate existing models (Grouping and AHP models) for mitigating the flaws and improve the performance (by adding new features) of the existing schemes. The model is evaluated using case studies.