Software Requirements Prioritization in the context of Global Software Development

Requirements engineering (RE) is the initial and most crucial phase of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). This phase involves multiple activities such as gathering requirements, analyzing, prioritizing, documenting, and validating user requirements. Requirements prioritization plays a crucial role in the successful execution of this phase. It helps us to decide which requirements are to be delivered first. Therefore, identifying user requirements and prioritizing them is a complex activity and needs frequent communication. It is a complex task and becomes even more complex while working with globally dispersed team members which is the main motivation behind this research. Our research aims to overcome the communication gap between stakeholders during requirements prioritization in GSD. To achieve the targeted objective, the practices of “Communicate-bond-belong theory (CBB)” have been incorporated into the requirements prioritization framework. The results ensure effective communication among the globally dispersed team members. Moreover, the validation of the proposed model is done with the help of a control group experiment. Later on, the Goal-Question Metric (GQM) approach is used to evaluate the obtained results with the help of statistical evaluation techniques. The proposed technique could successfully assist the practitioners in prioritizing requirements in the GSD context.