A Mutliple Stakeholders’ Software Requirements Prioritization Approach based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets

Prioritization of requirements in a software project is a crucial activity for the project success. Taking into account the time and budget constraints imposed by the available project resources, it is often not possible to implement all candidate requirements in a single software release. Thus, software requirements should be evaluated by the involved stakeholders based on multiple value/cost criteria. Stakeholders’ evaluations are often characterized by indecision, hesitation and lack of knowledge which can be expressed by evaluating some requirements with the same ratings or leaving some requirements unrated. This paper suggests a multiple stakeholders’ requirements prioritization approach based on Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets (IFSs). Tied or unrated requirements are represented mathematically by utilizing IFSs which are an extension to Fuzzy Sets capable of expressing stakeholders’ positive, negative as well as "neutral/don’t know" assessments. The proposed approach is supported by a consensus reaching technique which aggregates multiple stakeholders’ ratings on the candidate requirements with the aim to improve the level of stakeholders’ agreement on the final prioritization results. The validation of the proposed approach was performed by considering the requirements dataset of a real software development project.