Facilitating Software Architecting by Ranking Requirements Based on their Impact on the Architecture Process

Ranking software requirements helps decide what requirements to implement during a software development project, and when. Currently, requirements ranking techniques focus on resource constraints or stakeholder priorities and neglect the effect of requirements on the software architecture process. However, the order in which requirements are implemented impacts the process of creating architectures and should therefore be chosen carefully. Thus, this paper presents a method for ranking requirements with a focus on the impact of requirements on the architecture process. The proposed method uses stakeholder input and architecture-relevant requirements attributes to create a ranking of requirements. A case study is presented to evaluate the usefulness of the method.