A Graph Based Approach to Prioritization of Software Functional Requirements

Abstract

Requirements prioritization plays important role for a successful requirements implementation. Functional requirements, in specific, represents the specification of behavior between the inputs and outputs. They are prioritized based on the high-level requirements of the system and subsystems functionalities, as well as the type of software, expected users and the type of system where the software is used. Nonetheless, prioritization of functional requirements is very challenging considering a project where the requirements are huge. In practice, prioritization of functional requirements highly depends on stakeholders preference for giving priorities in features selection instead of based on its internal structure and characteristics. This is because the key information in functional requirements concern on business processes, security, performance, data migration and conversion. This paper proposes a graph-based approach for prioritizing functional requirements using directed acyclic graphs for relating requirements with one another on the basis of its importance to overall project and how much it is required for other requirements.The proposed approach is then evaluated in terms of total time estimation to project completion. The experimental results showed that the graph-based approach is able to effectively prioritize functional requirements with lower estimated project completion time as compared to non-prioritized requirements. The approach will help software vendors to deliver projects well within the total project duration