Considering Multiple Stakeholders Perspectives for interval-based Goal Oriented Requirements Prioritization in agile development

Abstract

Addressing the importance of the requirements prioritization, recent research introduced ‘A value-based approach for reasoning with goal models’, which allows stakeholders to set an importance estimate for each element in a goal model, that relates the requirements with the business objectives. These estimates are then propagated by means of their relationships (dependencies, contributions and decompositions) to get a prioritized list of all requirements.In this paper, a methodology that extends the aforementioned technique is presented. It uses Goal Oriented Requirements Language (GRL) to prioritize requirements in an agile environment, taking into consideration the opinion of many Stakeholders. As the static value of the estimate is never accurate and does not give the stakeholders enough flexibility, the proposed methodology enables each stakeholder to provide for each requirement its importance as an estimated interval instead of a static value. Then, for each requirement the mean value of the estimation interval is calculated, the information asymmetry and confidence level per requirement are demonstrated, so that a prioritized list can then be generated. The analyst can choose to use the prioritized list based on one of these criteria. This methodology is demonstrated on a case study.