Maintainability-Based Requirements Prioritization by Using Artifacts Traceability and Code Metrics

Abstract

Requirements prioritization is a fundamental ac- tivity during software systems development and improvement. Prioritize requirements, in fact, means to determine the ordering in which requirements have to be considered in a given planning or development activity. Most of the existing requirements prioritization techniques and tools focus on user and non/functional point of views while only few attempt exists that considers how requirements are actually implemented, if they are implemented. This paper presents a tool that prioritizes (change) requirements by using artifacts traceability information, to locate the requirements implementation, and a set of code-based metrics, to measure several properties (e.g., coupling, size, scattering) of the requirements implementation. The tool, hence, determines the requirements ordering according to how requirements are implemented in the software system.