Using Fuzzy Linguistic 2-Tuples to Collectively Prioritize Software Requirements based on Stakeholders' Evaluations

Efficient consideration of all stakeholders' needs and perspectives in a software project is a key challenge, especially when prioritizing the software requirements to be developed in the next software release. This paper presents a new requirements prioritization approach that aims to collectively prioritize software requirements based on their ratings expressed from different stakeholders. The proposed approach follows the steps of a value-oriented process in which multiple and possibly distributed stakeholders assess the values of candidate requirements with respect to various prioritization criteria. The approach applies a group-based, fuzzy multi-criteria technique requiring from involved stakeholders to evaluate requirements using linguistic terms. Stakeholders' linguistic evaluations are aggregated to collectively derive more objective and reasonable assessments on the final requirements' priorities1.