Automatic Prioritization of Requirements using Topic Modeling and Stakeholder Needs-Artifacts

Jong-In Jang, Jongmoon Baik

http://doi.org/

Due to the limitations of budget, resources, and time invested in a project, software requirements should be prioritized and be implemented in order of importance. Existing approaches to prioritizing requirements mostly depend on human decisions. The manual prioritization process is based on intensive interactions with the stakeholders, thus raising the issues of scalability and biased prioritization. To solve these problems, we propose a fully automated requirements prioritization approach, ToMSN (Topic Modeling Stakeholder Needs for requirements prioritization), by topic modeling the stakeholder needs-artifacts earned in the requirements elicitation phase. The requirements dataset of a 30,000-user system was utilized for the performance evaluation. ToMSN showed competitive prioritizing accuracy with existing approaches without human aids, therefore solving scalability and biased prioritization issues.