Investigating Fitness Functions for Search-based Requirements Prioritization

Abstract

It can be challenging for people to select the most relevant requirementamong several software system development options.Requirements prioritization defines the ordering for executing requirementsbased on their priority or importance concerning stakeholders’viewpoints, which is a problematic task. Based on thisproblem, this study aims to present a requirements prioritizationapproach using a genetic algorithm to find optimal solutions, andit can assist in the requirements prioritization activity during thesoftware development process. In this paper, we investigated aset of criteria to create four functions GUT-D, ThS-D, ST, and LT,to assess candidate solutions, i.e., the recommended prioritizedrequirements. We examine the empirical results concerning thepractical approach’s effectiveness and cost computational two experimentsin the evaluation. We found that the 𝐺𝑈𝑇 − 𝐷 fitnessfunction achieved the best fitness value in different settings with90.51% and 98.63%. Besides that, our study demonstrates that the approachis promising to assist requirements prioritization since eachfitness function can be used individually according to companies’necessities.