Improved practical support for large-scale requirements prioritising

An efficient, accurate and practical process for prioritising requirements is of great importance in commercial software developments. This article improves an existing cost-value approach in which stakeholders compare all unique pairs of candidate requirements according to their value and their cost of implementation. Techniques for reducing the required number of comparisons are suggested, thus making the process more efficient. An initial approach for managing requirements interdependencies is proposed. A support tool for the improved process has been developed to make the process more practical in commercial developments. The improved process and its support tool have been applied and evaluated in an industrial project at Ericsson Radio Systems AB. The results indicate a pressing need for mature processes for prioritising requirements, and the work presented here is an important step in that direction.