Enabling the Requirements Prioritization Techniques to Improve the Quality of Agile Practices

Abstract

Agile model has become increasingly popular in most software organizations. The main objective of agile development is to deliver the software in different iterations. Requirement prioritization is an important part of requirement engineering in the agile development model. The requirements continuously change in agile models, which makes requirement prioritization a challenging task. The researchers have proposed several models for requirement prioritization, but there is still a need for improvement in these models. In this research study, we performed a case study to propose a requirement prioritization model. The case study was conducted in five organizations by interviewing several professionals working on the agile project. The case study found a few factors that mostly influence the requirement prioritization process. We proposed a conceptual requirement prioritization model based on the factors that were determined during the case study. To validate the proposed model, we implemented this model on a project that was currently being developed by one of the interviewed organizations. As the proposed model was conceptual, we used the grounded theory technique for giving numerical values to the qualitative data. During the implementation of the model on the project, a professional from a software organization gave numerical values to the various factors of different requirements of the project. The prioritized list obtained after implementing the model was more efficient and effective.