Prioritization of Software Functional Requirements from Developers Perspective

Abstract

Prioritizing software requirements is important and difficult task during requirements management phase of requirements engineering. To ensure timely delivery of project, software developers have to prioritize functional requirements. The importance of prioritization increases when size of requirements is big. Software for large enterprises like the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are more likely to be developed by a team of software developers where large size requirements are distributed in parallel team members. However, requirements are dependent on each other, therefore development of pre-requisite requirements must be carefully timed and should be implemented first. Therefore, assigning importance and priority to some requirements over others is necessary so that requirements can be available on time to developers. This paper proposes a prioritization approach for functional requirements on the basis of their importance during implementation. The design of research method consists of Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) technique based on spanning trees. Through spanning trees, dependent requirements were linked in hierarchical structure and then AHP were applied. As a result of prioritization, requirements were distributed in such a way that dependency among requirements of developers were kept minimum as much as possible so that waiting time of requirements for their pre-requisite were reduced. With reduced effect of dependency in requirements of parallel developers, timely delivery of software projects can be assured.