Evaluation of a Stakeholder Satisfaction-oriented Method for Prioritising Change Requests

Abstract

The prioritisation of change requests for an evolving software is an important and complex activity in the continuous requirements engineering and release planning of an evolving product. We have explored such prioritisation with an organisation consisting of several business units appearing as stakeholders that compete for the same development resources. The challenge lay in taking objective factors like the cost-benefit ratio and technical dependencies of the requests into account while creating a high level of stakeholder satisfaction with the defined release scope. Together with the organisation, we have designed and implemented a tailored method that uses the stakeholders’ satisfaction as a structured means for validating the criteria-based prioritisation results. The paper extends prior work by taking the perspective of the organisational stakeholders and describing the method design from the organisation’s perspective, reports the use of the method in the organisation, and summarises the lessons learned from using the method in the organisation. The results are useful to increase the maturity of prioritisation in industrialpractice.