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ReproTizer: A Fully Implemented Software Requirements Prioritization Tool

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Book cover Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XXII

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((TCCI,volume 9655))

Abstract

Before software is developed, requirements are elicited. These requirements could be over-blown or under-estimated in a way that meeting the expectations of stakeholders becomes a challenge. To develop a software that precisely meets the expectations of stakeholders, elicited requirements need to be prioritized. When requirements are prioritized, contract breaches such as budget over-shoot, exceeding delivery time and missing out important requirements during implementation can be totally avoided. A number of techniques have been developed but these techniques do not addresses some of the crucial issues associated with real-time prioritization of software requirements such as computational complexities and high time consumption rate, inaccurate rank results, inability of dealing with uncertainties or missing weights of requirements, scalability problems and rank update issues. To address these problems, a tool known as ReproTizer (Requirements Prioritizer) is proposed to engender real-time prioritization of software requirements. ReproTizer consist of a WS (Weight Scale) which avails project stakeholders the ability to perceive the influence, different requirements weights may have on the final results. The WS combines a single relative weight decision matrices to determine the weight vectors of requirements with an aggregation operator (AO) which computes the global weights of requirements. The tool was tested for scalability, computational complexity, accuracy, time consumption and rank updates. Results of the performance evaluation showed that the tool is highly reliable (98.89 % accuracy), scalable (prioritized over 1000 requirements), less time consumption and complexity ranging from 500–29,804 milliseconds (ms) of total prioritization time and able to automatically update ranks whenever changes occurs. Requirements prioritization, a multi-criteria decision making task is therefore an integral aspect of the requirements engineering phase of the development life cycle phases. It is used for software release planning and leads to the development of software systems based on the preferential requirements of stakeholders.

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Acknowledgement

The Universiti Teknologi Malaysia (UTM) under Research University funding vot number 02G31 and Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) Malaysia under vot number 4F550 are hereby sincerely acknowledged for providing the research funds to complete this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Computing, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia, 81310, Johor Bahru, Johor, Malaysia

    Philip Achimugu, Ali Selamat & Roliana Ibrahim

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  1. Philip Achimugu
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  2. Ali Selamat
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Correspondence to Ali Selamat .

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  1. Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland

    Ngoc Thanh Nguyen

  2. Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Australia

    Ryszard Kowalczyk

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Achimugu, P., Selamat, A., Ibrahim, R. (2016). ReproTizer: A Fully Implemented Software Requirements Prioritization Tool. In: Nguyen, N.T., Kowalczyk, R. (eds) Transactions on Computational Collective Intelligence XXII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9655. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49619-0_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-49619-0_5

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