Enhancing Reusability: An Integrated Framework for Software Requirements Classification and Prioritization

Requirements Prioritization (RP) is the process of planning, identifying, rating and organizing requirements to avoid breach of trust, contract or agreement. The need of RP is inevitable if the concerns, cost and budget estimation of the stakeholders are considered as primary parameters in a software project. In order to ensure the reusability of existing modules, the new requirements must be classified and coordinated with the current ones in the repository, which guarantees the monetary use of assets. In this research, we have suggested a new framework for software requirements classification and prioritization. This framework is called the Software Requirements Classification and Prioritization Framework (SCPF). It will help the software project managers in managing the requirements at the initial stage of software development. We have identified the key factors and developed a taxonomy in order to classify these factors. This study likewise devised a new RP algorithm, which is based on the normalized aggregation values of the identified factors, and also contributes for the requirements classification by using K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN) classifier based on the well-known Normalized Compression Distance (NCD) similarity measure. In addition to this, we have implemented the SCPF by developing a Web-based application which provides the computation features for requirements classification and prioritization. Furthermore, we have conducted a case study and an industry survey to evaluate the results of the SCPF. A comparative study is also presented to show the effectiveness of SCPF with respect to three different state-of-the-art RP approaches. The computed SCPF results are very promising and showed significant improvement in the quality of requirements classification and prioritization.