A Novel Requirements Prioritization Approach based on 360 Degree Feedback and Group Recommendation

Abstract

Requirements' prioritization (RP) is an important activity in software development and a crucial step towards making proper decisions for the software release planning. RP is performed by various categories of stakeholders, such as end-users, customers, developers, designers, managers etc. Numerous different techniques exist to prioritize requirements but a set of problems is present in almost every case: (i) hesitation or even lack of knowledge and inability of some stakeholders to evaluate the priorities of some candidate requirements, and (ii) difficulties for stakeholders in reaching consensus on the final RP. The aim of this paper is to present a novel RP approach that addresses these problems and supports the justification of stakeholders' decisions. We categorize stakeholders in distinct sets according to their role in the software project and we ask them to follow a 360-Degree Feedback (360DF) assessment for calculating stakeholders' weights. The RP approach considers as prioritization criteria the satisfaction/dissatisfaction of stakeholders from offering/not offering software requirements as part of next software release and utilizes techniques from Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets (IFSs) to represent and handle the stakeholders' hesitation/uncertainty. The RP approach also takes advantage from Recommender Systems (RS) to support stakeholders during the evaluation procedure and to assist them to reach consensus for the final prioritization list. © 2021 ACM.