Partial selection of agile software requirements

Abstract

Prioritization And Selection (PAS) of requirements is an important concern of Agile software development. Existing PAS techniques are primarily binary selection of requirements and postponing lower-priority requirements to the future. As a result, lower-priority requirements may be constantly delayed until they never have a chance to be implemented at all. However, ignoring lower-priority requirements may threaten the quality of software. In this paper, we propose the concept of partial selection as an alternative to binary selection of Agile software requirements rather than ignoring them altogether or postponing them to the future releases. We further contribute a goal-oriented framework that allows requirements to be partially satisfied when tolerated. The framework specifies the fuzzy priority of requirements and accomplishes partial selection through relaxing the satisfaction level of requirements with respect to their priority in the release backlog of software. The experimental results show that partial selection of requirements will reduce the number of neglected requirements when compared to binary selection.