A rough-set based approach for the prioritization of software requirements

Software requirements prioritization (SRP) is one of the key activities of the requirements elicitation process in which several decision makers are involved for the evaluation of the software requirements (SRs) based on various criteria. Different fuzzy based methods have been developed to compute the ranking values of the SRs. In these methods different types of membership functions are employed to model the linguistic variables. It is hard to decide the boundary of the fuzzy set accurately because membership functions are selected on the basis of subjective judgement. The fuzzy based methods may affect the ranking order of the SRs because it focuses on subjectivity and lacks objectivity. To address this issue, we present a method for the prioritization of SRs using rough set theory. The applicability of the proposed method is explained using the examination system of an educational institute. Based on our analysis we find that the proposed method captures the exact opinion of the decision makers during the SRP process and no prior information is needed to compute the ranking values of the SRs. © 2021, Bharati Vidyapeeth's Institute of Computer Applications and Management.