Prioritization of quality requirements: State of practice in eleven companies
Paper in proceeding, 2011

Requirements prioritization is recognized as an important but challenging activity in software product development. For a product to be successful, it is crucial to find the right balance among competing quality requirements. Although literature offers many methods for requirements prioritization, the research on prioritization of quality requirements is limited. This study identifies how quality requirements are prioritized in practice at 11 successful companies developing software intensive systems. We found that ad-hoc prioritization and priority grouping of requirements are the dominant methods for prioritizing quality requirements. The results also show that it is common to use customer input as criteria for prioritization but absence of any criteria was also common. The results suggests that quality requirements by default have a lower priority than functional requirements, and that they only get attention in the prioritizing process if decision-makers are dedicated to invest specific time and resources on QR prioritization. The results of this study may help future research on quality requirements to focus investigations on industry-relevant issues.

Quality Requirements

Requirements Prioritization

Project Management

Product Management

Empirical Study

Non-functional requirements

Author

R. B. Svensson

Lund University

Tony Gorschek

Blekinge Tekniska Högskola, BTH

Björn Regnell

Lund University

Richard Torkar

University of Gothenburg

Ali Shahrokni

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Robert Feldt

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers), Software Engineering (Chalmers)

Aybuke Aurum

University of New South Wales (UNSW)

2011 IEEE 19th International Requirements Engineering Conference, RE 2011; Trento; 29 August 2011 through 2 September 2011

69-78
978-145770923-4 (ISBN)

Subject Categories

Computer and Information Science

DOI

10.1109/RE.2011.6051652

ISBN

978-145770923-4

More information

Latest update

4/6/2018 1