Exact Analysis for Next Release Problem

In software engineering, determining the set of requirements to implement in the next release is a critical foundation for the success of a project. Inappropriately including or excluding requirements may result in products that fail to satisfy stakeholders' needs, and might cause loss of revenue. In the meantime, uncertainty is characterised by incomplete understanding. It is inevitable in the early phase of requirements engineering, and could lead to unsound requirement decisions. To ease the impact of uncertainty in the software development process, it is important to provide techniques that explicitly manage uncertainty in requirements analysis and optimisation. This proposed research aims to provide a decision support framework for analysing uncertainty in requirements selection and optimisation. The proposed research involves three stages. Firstly, a simulation optimisation technique is introduced to model requirements uncertainty in requirements optimisation. Then, an exact technique is designed to eliminate the algorithmic uncertainty. Lastly, a probabilistic uncertainty analysis is applied to help the decision maker to understand requirement uncertainty propagation and the characteristics of requirements in requirements selection process.