Multi-criteria and Multi-expert Requirement Prioritization using Fuzzy Linguistic Labels

Abstract

Requirement prioritization in Software Engineering is the activity that helps to select and order for the requirements to be implemented in each software development process iteration. Thus, requirement prioritization assists the decision-making process during iteration management. This work presents a method for requirement prioritization that considers many experts' opinions on multiple decision criteria provided using fuzzy linguistic labels, a tool that allows capturing the imprecision of each experts' judgment. These opinions are then aggregated using the fuzzy aggregation operator MLIOWA considering different weights for each expert. Then, an order for the requirements is given considering the aggregated opinions and different weights for each evaluated dimension or criteria. The method proposed in this work has been implemented and demonstrated using a synthetic dataset. A statistical evaluation of the results obtained using different t-norms was also carried out.

Keywords

• Requirement prioritization
• Fuzzy logic
• Linguistic labels
• OWA
• Software Engineering