A systematic literature review of software requirements prioritization research

During requirements engineering, prioritization is performed to grade or rank requirements in their order of importance and subsequent implementation releases. It is a major step taken in making crucial decisions so as to increase the economic value of a system. The purpose of this study is to identify and analyze existing prioritization techniques in the context of the formulated research questions. Search terms with relevant keywords were used to identify primary studies that relate requirements prioritization classified under journal articles, conference papers, workshops, symposiums, book chapters and IEEE bulletins. 73 Primary studies were selected from the search processes. Out of these studies; 13 were journal articles, 35 were conference papers and 8 were workshop papers. Furthermore, contributions from symposiums as well as IEEE bulletins were 2 each while the total number of book chapters amounted to 13. Prioritization has been significantly discussed in the requirements engineering domain. However, it was generally discovered that, existing prioritization techniques suffer from a number of limitations which includes: lack of scalability, methods of dealing with rank updates during requirements evolution, coordination among stakeholders and requirements dependency issues. Also, the applicability of existing techniques in complex and real setting has not been reported yet.