Requirements Prioritization Challenges in Practice Laura Lehtola, Marjo Kauppinen, and Sari Kujala Helsinki University of Technology, Software Business and Engineering Institute, P.O. Box 9210, FIN-02015 HUT, Finland (Laura.Lehtola, Marjo.Kauppinen, Sari.Kujala)@hut.fi Abstract. Requirements prioritization is recognized as an important activity in product development. In this paper, we describe the current state of requirements prioritization practices in two case companies and present the practical challenges involved. Our study showed that require- ments prioritization is an ambiguous concept and current practices in the companies are informal. Requirements prioritization requires complex context-specific decision-making and must be performed iteratively in many phases during development work. Practitioners are seeking more systematic ways to prioritize requirements but they find it difficult to pay attention to all the relevant factors that have an effect on priorities and explicitly to draw different stakeholder views together. In addition, practitioners need more information about real customer preferences. 1 Introduction Prioritizing requirements is an important activity in product development [1, 2, 3, 4]. When customer expectations are high, timelines short, and resources limited, the product must deliver the most essential functionality as early as possible [5] and the scope of each release must be limited [1]. Many projects face the fact that not all the requirements can be implemented because of limited time and resource constraints. That means that it has to be decided which of the requirements can be removed from the next release. According to Wiegers [5] information about priorities is needed, not just so as to be able to ignore the least important requirements but also to help the project manager to resolve conflicts, plan for staged deliveries, and make the necessary trade-offs. Harwel et al. [6] describe a priority as being a characteristic of a requirement that can be used for different purposes, depending on program and company needs. However, requirements prioritization is also recognized as a very challeng- ing activity. For example, Lubars et al. [7] report that none of the companies in their study really knew how to assign and modify priorities or how to com- municate those priorities effectively to project members. Furthermore, Karlsson et. al [2] argue that despite the recent rapid and welcome growth in require- ments engineering (RE) research, managers still do not have simple, effective, and industrially proven techniques for prioritizing requirements.