Exploring prioritization through systematic literature surveys and case studies <s> Motivation <s> This article describes an evaluation of six different methods for prioritizing software requirements. Based on the quality requirements for a telephony system, the authors individually used all six methods on separate occasions to prioritize the requirements. The methods were then characterized according to a number of criteria from a user's perspective. We found the analytic hierarchy process to be the most promising method, although it may be problematic to scale-up. In an industrial follow-up study we used the analytic hierarchy process to further investigate its applicability. We found that the process is demanding but worth the effort because of its ability to provide reliable results, promote knowledge transfer and create consensus among project members. <s> BIB001 </s> Exploring prioritization through systematic literature surveys and case studies <s> Motivation <s> The process of selecting the right set of requirements for a product release is highly dependent on how well we succeed in prioritising the requirements candidates. There are different techniques available for requirements prioritisation, some more elaborate than others. In order to compare different techniques, a controlled experiment was conducted with the objective of understanding differences regarding time consumption, ease of use, and accuracy. The requirements prioritisation techniques compared in the experiment are the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and a variation of the planning game (PG), isolated from extreme programming. The subjects were 15 Ph.D. students and one professor, who prioritised mobile phone features using both methods. It was found that the straightforward and intuitive PG was less time consuming, and considered by the subjects as easier to use, and more accurate than AHP (Less) <s> BIB002 </s> Exploring prioritization through systematic literature surveys and case studies <s> Motivation <s> In a company producing off-the-shelf software for mass markets, the future development steps of the products cannot be negotiated with one or few customers. The decisions concerning the priorities of the requirements must be made within the company, the developer bearing all the financial risks included. This means that finding the right priorities for the requirements is important. However, requirements prioritization is recognized as a difficult activity in software product development. The literature offers methods for requirements prioritization, but many authors report that practices in companies are mostly informal. In this study, we evaluated two requirements prioritization methods in industrial product development projects. In the first case, the users of the system evaluated the pair-wise comparison technique for prioritizing user needs. In the second case, practitioners evaluated Wiegers' method for change requests. In addition, we interviewed 11 practitioners from 6 companies about their current requirements prioritization practices and the models that they use as a basis of their prioritization decisions. Our findings indicate that prioritization methods may have limited ability to support decision-making in a complex area like requirements prioritization in market-driven product development. In addition, there are practical difficulties in the usage of methods, and therefore, prioritization results should be taken more as being indicative than as an ultimate truth. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. <s> BIB003 </s> Exploring prioritization through systematic literature surveys and case studies <s> Motivation <s> Requirements prioritization aims at identifying the most important requirements for a software system, a crucial step when planning for system releases and deciding which requirements to implement in each release. Several prioritization methods and supporting tools have been proposed so far. How to evaluate their properties, with the aim of supporting the selection of the most appropriate method for a specific project, is considered a relevant question. In this paper, we present an empirical study aiming at evaluating two state-of-the art tool-supported requirements prioritization methods, AHP and CBRank. We focus on three measures: the ease of use, the time-consumption and the accuracy. The experiment has been conducted with 23 experienced subjects on a set of 20 requirements from a real project. Results indicate that for the first two characteristics CBRank overcomes AHP, while for the accuracy AHP performs better than CBRank, even if the resulting ranks from the two methods are very similar. The majority of the users found CBRank the ''overall best'' method. <s> BIB004 </s> Exploring prioritization through systematic literature surveys and case studies <s> Motivation <s> Regression testing is a testing activity that is performed to provide confidence that changes do not harm the existing behaviour of the software. Test suites tend to grow in size as software evolve, often making it too costly to execute entire test suites. A number of different approaches have been studied to maximise the value of the accrued test suite: minimisation, selection and prioritisation. Test suite minimisation seeks to eliminate redundant test cases in order to reduce the number of tests to run. Test case selection seeks to identify the test cases that are relevant to some set of recent changes. Test case prioritisation seeks to order test cases in such a way that early fault detection is maximised. This paper surveys each area of minimisation, selection and prioritisation technique and discusses open problems and potential directions for future research. Copyright c © 2007 Shin Yoo & Mark Harman <s> BIB005 </s> Exploring prioritization through systematic literature surveys and case studies <s> Motivation <s> The objective of this paper is to conduct a controlled experiment with the three requirements prioritization techniques: Numerical Assignment (NA), Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Extensive Numerical Assignment (ENA), each based on ordinal, ratio and interval scales respectively. NA and AHP are widely used traditional requirements prioritization techniques. ENA is a novel technique introduced by the authors, which acknowledges the uncertain and incomplete nature of human judgment about requirements priorities, which are in turn uncertain guesses about the upcoming product. The aim of the experiment is to examine the three techniques using various objective and subjective measures like number of decisions, time consumption, ease of use, attractiveness, scalability and reprioritizability. The experiment was executed by prioritizing the requirements of a university website system with students as participants in the experiment. The results of the experiment proved that ENA transcends NA and AHP. <s> BIB006 </s> Exploring prioritization through systematic literature surveys and case studies <s> Motivation <s> Context: During requirements engineering, prioritization is performed to grade or rank requirements in their order of importance and subsequent implementation releases. It is a major step taken in making crucial decisions so as to increase the economic value of a system. Objective: The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze existing prioritization techniques in the context of the formulated research questions. Method: Search terms with relevant keywords were used to identify primary studies that relate requirements prioritization classified under journal articles, conference papers, workshops, symposiums, book chapters and IEEE bulletins. Results: 73 Primary studies were selected from the search processes. Out of these studies; 13 were journal articles, 35 were conference papers and 8 were workshop papers. Furthermore, contributions from symposiums as well as IEEE bulletins were 2 each while the total number of book chapters amounted to 13. Conclusion: Prioritization has been significantly discussed in the requirements engineering domain. However, it was generally discovered that, existing prioritization techniques suffer from a number of limitations which includes: lack of scalability, methods of dealing with rank updates during requirements evolution, coordination among stakeholders and requirements dependency issues. Also, the applicability of existing techniques in complex and real setting has not been reported yet. <s> BIB007
The survey, conducted by BIB005 highlights the limitations of existing prioritization techniques (especially those based on ratio scale) to handle the flood of requirements as they suffer from scalability problem (with increase in number of requirements, effort increases). Number of requirements will keep on increasing which will increase prioritization efforts. Techniques based on other measurement scale can be used to drastically lower efforts, but the less powerful scale limits this idea because it does not provide detailed information about the results for further analysis. The most powerful ratio scale techniques are based on pairwise comparison (example AHP). These are considered to be more accurate than the non pairwise ones (Karlsson 1996; BIB001 BIB004 ); although it suffers greatly from scalability problems BIB007 BIB006 BIB004  BIB001 BIB002 BIB003 Ribeiro et al. 2011) . Software Engineers face dilemma of tradeoffs between the measurement scale, working principle (pairwise and non pair wise) and effort to be invested. The literature lacks the prioritization methods that can handle large number of requirements with minimal efforts. Literature provides many prioritization techniques differing in measurement scale used and working algorithm, etc. but the efficiency in mass market development environments (continuous flood) is yet to be completely established. The available work is limited to models for performing reprioritization activities, and only a few reprioritization methods, actually focusing on the flood of requirements, are available. Such reprioritization methods must be employed on real softwares to properly comment on their likelihood of passing uncertainty and risks involved in mass market developments. The case studies with software development organizations  ) reveal the mercy situation of software industries, where few industry people understand the importance of changing priorities, yet they do not have any established means of doing so, while the majority of them are still unmotivated towards reprioritization. The industries are still using prioritization techniques for changing priorities of changed requirements, while the new requirements are allotted priorities using same prioritization techniques based on guesswork and Business Values. This motivated the authors of this paper to come up with a comparative analysis based on systematic survey of literature and software industry case studies, that are focused on lack of reprioritization based research and industry software development practices. The net outcome may make the audience aware of the need for sound reprioritization especially based on pairwise comparisons.