International Journal of Engineering Science Invention ISSN (Online): 2319 – 6734, ISSN (Print): 2319 – 6726 www.ijesi.org ||Volume 5 Issue 9|| September 2016 || PP. 38-43 www.ijesi.org 38 | Page Different Approaches of Software Requirement Prioritization Mulugu.Narendhar 1 , Dr.K.Anuradha 2 1 Associate Professor & HOD, Scient Institute of Technology, CSE Dept, Hyderabad, TS, India, 2 Professor & HOD, Griet, CSE Dept, Hyderabad, TS, India. Abstract: In software system development, it can be a challenge for people to select the ‘right’ requirement among several or many options if it is not obvious which requirement is desirable. Requirements prioritization helps people to discover the most desirable 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. Requirement prioritization process is used to determine which candidate requirement of a software project should be included in a certain release, for this purpose different techniques are used. These techniques use different approaches and consider different factors for prioritization e.g. cost, value, risk, benefit etc. Keywords: scalability, requirements prioritization, MoScow, AHP, Minimal spanning tree. I. INTRODUCTION Requirements prioritization is an important activity in software development. Usually, the number of requirements from the customers exceeds the number of features that can be implemented within the given time and available resources. For that reason, some of the requested features will not be completed or they are moved to later releases. Therefore, the customer and the development teams must decide what is the most essential functionality which should be implemented as early as possible. In other words, the stakeholders should prioritize the requirements. There are numerous different techniques presented in the literature how to prioritize requirements. It might be difficult to pick the most suitable method because of the large number of them. Some methods are more time consuming than others but provide more accurate results. Some methods scale well to be used with larger number of requirements but provide very coarse results. In other words, none of the techniques can really be considered the best one but a practitioner must pick a technique that is the most suitable for his situation, for example, in terms of scalability, accuracy and time consumption. Generally, not all the requirements contain equal user satisfaction. It is often not obvious which requirement contains high user satisfaction among hundreds or thousands of requirements. When only one stakeholder is involved in the project, it is relatively easy to make decisions since only one stakeholder’s opinion needs to be considered. When more than one stakeholder is involved in the project, decisions can be harder to make, since different stakeholders have different perspectives. For example, project developers look for the requirements which can be implemented fast, financial managers look for the requirements with low cost, market managers look for the requirements with high market value, and end users look for the requirements which are easy use. One requirement may be of low cost, with short implementation time, but also 12 have low market value and be hard to use. Conversely, another requirement may have a high cost, but short time to be implemented, high market value and be easy to use. It can be a challenge for stakeholders to decide which requirements need to be implemented first. Requirements prioritization is a technique that can uncover the most important requirements to maximize the stakeholders’ satisfaction. II. ASPECTS OF REQUIREMENTS PRIORITIZATION Berander and Andrews (2005) define an aspect as a property or attribute that can be used to prioritize requirements. Synonymous words used by other authors are “factor” (Henry & Henry, 1993) and “criteria” (Hatton, 2007). Requirements can be prioritized based on different aspects such as importance, time, cost, penalty, and risk. Some aspects are introduced below Importance Stakeholders can prioritize requirements to find out which requirement is most important to them. However, the word “importance” can be a multifaceted concept which may have different meanings to different people. For example, importance could mean high market value, high quality of the product, or urgency of implementation among other things.. It is essential to specify the meaning of “importance” first to reduce the possibility of confusion when letting the stakeholders prioritize the requirements.