SWVP - A Requirements Prioritization Technique for Global Software Development

Requirements prioritization plays a vital role in software release planning, and the process requires good interaction between stakeholders. Requirement prioritization process is challenging in global software development (GSD) context, where communication and coordination are core bottlenecks. Based on the issues found in the literature and industry survey, this paper proposes a requirements prioritization technique for GSD settings based on stakeholders' weight, vote, and priority (SWVP). The technique has two phases: (1) a calculation of stakeholders' profile weights and setting up communication parameters and (2) a voting process supporting the actual prioritization, based on the weights from phase (1). The proposed technique was applied to three industrial projects. The feedback of the practitioners after using SWVP was encouraging, and the feedback results indicate that SWVP could be a practical solution for requirements prioritization in GSD contexts.