Towards Automatically Resolving Biasness and Conflicts in Stakeholders Input for Requirement Prioritization

Abstract

Requirements are needed before developing any project, so these requirements are elicited from the stakeholders. Software Engineers elicit these requirements to meet the demands of the stakeholders. Software engineers find it challenging to satisfy the demands of multi stakeholders if these elicited requirements are vague or misinterpreted. To meet the accuracy, satisfaction, and expectations of multi stakeholders, prioritization of the elicited requirements is needed. Prioritizing the elicited requirements can completely prevent contract breaches or violations like budget overruns, project deadline mismatches, overshooting of delivery dates, and omitting crucial requirements during development. There are various techniques have been introduced in this area, but the problems related to RE are still under research in terms of lack of collaboration among multi stakeholders, Developer’s effort in eliciting conflicted requirements and to make changes after, and resource and time waste. To address these problems, we designed an approach called the Collaborative Requirements Elicitation Tool (CRET), which is intended to facilitate and improve efficient collaboration between multiple users to get the best from requirements elicitation. To enable multiple stakeholders to cooperatively elicit the same goals and requirements toward project that are conflict-free and unbiased, our tool has been designed and developed in a way to support the real-time communication and collaboration among them and to get the requirements on which they are collaboratively satisfied. Our proposed tool was evaluated for its ability to get best accuracy measures to eliciting the requirements in an unbiased, conflict-free, collaborative, timely efficient and lowering the developer’s effort manner. In our proposed tool CRET, requirement elicitation was done collaboratively, by using the Point P rating technique to set the requirement prioritizing values and employed the k-mean clustering algorithm prioritize the elicited requirements. Introduced two new features in this research is the report requirement feature and other is authority approval to remove the conflicts before forwarding the requirements for prioritization. We utilized the PHP LARAVEL framework to develop this web-based tool. With groups 2 of requirement engineers and client stakeholders, we conducted a user study to evaluate the tool, focusing on requirement elicitation and prioritization using CRET. The study's findings indicate that our proposed automated tool support can assist multiple stakeholders in collaborative communicating with other stakeholders more effectively to produce better and improved requirement elicitation, and our tool eliminates conflicts and biases of multiple stakeholders during elicitation through their collaboration. Our tool works in the four operational steps collaboratively RE (requirement elicitation), RRR (Req rating and reviewing), AA (authority approval) and RP (requirement prioritizing). In the RE phase of the software development life cycle; RP is a task that relates to multi phase decision making. It is mostly used for software release planning and influences the creation of the best software product by eliciting stakeholders' preferred needs.