A Multi-objective and Cost-Aware Optimization of Requirements Assignment For Review

A typical way to improve the quality of requirements is to assign them to suitable stakeholders for reviewing. Due to different characteristics of requirements and diverse background of stakeholders, it is needed to find an optimal solution for requirements assignment. Existing search-based requirements assignment solutions focus on maximizing stakeholders' familiarities to assigned requirements and balancing the overall workload of each stakeholder. However, a cost-effective requirements assignment solution should also take into account another two optimization objectives: 1) minimizing required time for reviewing requirements, and 2) minimizing the monetary cost required for performing reviewing tasks. We formulated the requirements assignment problem as a search problem and defined a fitness function considering all the five optimization objectives. We conducted an empirical evaluation to assess the fitness function together with six search algorithms using a real-world case study and 120 artificial problems to assess the scalability of the proposed fitness function. Results show that overall, our optimization problem is complex and further justifies the use for multi-objective search algorithms, and the Speed-constrained Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (SMPSO) algorithm performed the best among all the search algorithms.