Automation of Software Requirement Prioritization using Btrees

Abstract

In software system development, it can be a challenge to select the ‘right’ requirement among several or many options if it is not obvious which requirement is desirable. Requirements prioritization helps us to discover the most desirable requirements. Software developers are seldom able to implement stakeholders' requirements fully when time and resources are limited. To solve the problem, requirement engineers together with the stakeholders must prioritize requirements. It seems that most requirements prioritization techniques work well on a small number of requirements, but many of them have constraints on medium to large numbers of requirements. We have presented a tool based on the 100 dollar technique and Btree method to deal with prioritization of requirements. The 100 dollar approach consists of a method that gives priority values to the requirements according to the stakeholders, in order to aid system management and software quality. Every stakeholder has its own needs and therefore gives different importance value to different requirements. The 100 dollar method allows an input from all the stakeholders for the requirements. The priority values help the system analysts, developers and customers make decisions about the requirements. Based on the values given by the approach, requirements can be skipped or developed later. The need to prioritize increases with the number of requirements so it is difficult to remember the priority values and to rank them according to the values. Knowing the rank of the requirements, the plan of the releases can be done. It is possible to plan by knowing which functions are critical and how they can be distributed. To find out the rank and the order in which these priorities can be implemented a method of Btree is used. Btree will help in ordering the requirements and also will allow an easy way to add, edit or delete the requirements.