Exploratory study of existing research on software requirements prioritization: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Requirements prioritization is giving priority to software requirements on the basis of its importance. The current research paper addresses the importance and limitations of existing research on requirements prioritization. A lot of requirements prioritization techniques are presented by authors, but these techniques have certain limitations. Not all techniques are either applied or suitable to prioritize all types of requirements. Similarly, in these techniques, only few are scalable for large size requirements. The objective of the current research is to identify all possible software requirements prioritization techniques and to show the suitability of these techniques to prioritize different types and sizes of requirements. To achieve research objectives, a systematic literature review (SLR) is carried out. In conducting SLR, planned protocol is designed, which include all the necessary steps necessary for SLR process. As a result of SLR, 60 primary studies were selected for data extraction as a result of SLR. Outcome of SLR shows that not all techniques are scalable to prioritize any size requirements. Also, there are few techniques found that are either applied on all types of requirements or not suitable to prioritize all types of requirements as these techniques are specifically designed for particular types of requirements.