Handling vagueness and subjectivity in requirements prioritization

This paper presents a novel requirements prioritization (RP) method which complements ad-hoc ranking approaches and ordinal scale-based RP techniques with capabilities of handing the vague and subjective perceptions that stakeholders have when they rank candidate requirements. To consider the indeterminacy and the lack of knowledge of stakeholders, the suggested method represents requirements' rankings with Intuitionistic Fuzzy Sets. The final priority list of requirements with respect to the prioritization criteria is derived by applying a multi-criteria decision method that is based on objective criteria weights. The larger the hesitation associated with a requirements ranking according to a chosen criterion, the smaller would be the weight of this criterion for the calculation of the final priority list. Through a case study, we demonstrate that the method is suitable for prioritizing requirements in an agile development process. 1