REQUIREMENTS PRIORITIZATION IN AGILE PROJECTS: FROM EXPERTS' PERSPECTIVES

Software becomes an essential part of our lives because of the required automation in every field. A software requirement plays an important role in its development. In Requirement Engineering (RE), requirement prioritization (RP) is the crucial activity to successfully deliver the software system. Recently, Agile Software Development (ASD) methods have become a widespread approach used by the software industry. ASD stresses the importance of providing the customer with a product with maximized business value. To achieve that, RP is used. The aim of this study is to investigate the current practice related to the RP process, including its timing, participants, criteria used, and prioritization techniques applied. An online questionnaire (based on a literature review) has been designed and a survey has been conducted with the focus group which mainly involves some practitioners or experts from the industry (domain experts) together with academicians (knowledge experts) in few parts of Malaysia. The researchers received 20 valid responses indicating RP practices in agile projects. The researchers found out that despite the fact that business value is the most common criterion used to prioritize requirements; other criteria like importance, complexity, and cost are considered as well. Other findings indicate that consideration of such multiple criteria requires different viewpoints, thus making RP a process that has to involve many participants of different roles in prioritizing the requirements. While the most popular technique used by the practitioners in this study is the MoSCoW technique. Besides, the survey study also asks for any special attention given to the non-functional requirements (NFRs) or user stories in the prioritization process in agile projects, since commonly known, due to the nature of the agile environment itself, the NFRs are nearly always neglected during the RP process. The results have shown that over 85% of respondents giving attention to NFRs during prioritization in agile projects and less than 15% stated that there are a few reasons why their team did not pay much attention to NFRs during the prioritization process