Skip to main content
Log in

Applying fuzzy preference relation for requirements prioritization in goal oriented requirements elicitation process

  • Original Article
  • Published:
International Journal of System Assurance Engineering and Management Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Goal oriented requirements elicitation processes are used to identify the requirements of software according to the need of stakeholders. A system may have thousands of requirements and it is difficult to prioritize such a large number of requirements when several stakeholders participate in requirements elicitation process. In literature, we identify that existing goal oriented requirements elicitation processes like KAOS, i*, AGORA do not support to prioritize the requirements when stakeholder’s preferences are in the form of linguistic variable and multi-criteria decision making approach is used in requirements elicitation process. Therefore, to address this issue, we present a method for prioritization of requirements using fuzzy based approach in goal oriented requirements elicitation process by combining α-level weighted F-preference relation and extent fuzzy analytic hierarchy process in group decision making process; and then we use binary tree sort method to get the prioritized list of requirements. Finally, the utilization of the proposed approach is demonstrated with the help of an example.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Aho AV, Hopcroft JE, Ullman JD (1983) Data structures and algorithms. Addison-Wesley, Amsterdam

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Anton AI (1996) Goal based requirements analysis. In: IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, pp. 136–144

  • Anwer S, Ikram N (2006) Goal oriented requirement engineering: a critical study of techniques. In: 12th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference

  • Chan L-K, Wu M-L (2007) Quality function deployment: a comprehensive reviews of its concepts and methods. Qual Eng, Taylor Francis 15(1):23–35

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chan HK, Wang X, White GRT, Yip N (2013) An extended fuzzy-AHP approach for the evaluation of green product designs. IEEE Trans Eng Manag 60(2):327–339

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chang DY (1996) Application of the extent analysis method on fuzzy AHP. Eur J Oper Res 95:649–655

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Chatzipetrou P, Angelis L, Rovegard P, Wohlin C (2010) Prioritization of issues and requirements by cumulative voting: a compositional data analysis method. In: EUROMICRO Conference in Software Engineering and Advanced Application, pp. 361–370

  • Chung L, Nixon BA, Yu E, Mylopoulos J (2000) Non functional requirements in software engineering. Kluwer Academic Publisher, Boston

    Book  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Firesmith D (2004) Prioritizing requirements. J. Object Technol 3(8):35–47

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fukushima T, Yamada S (2010) Software process improvements by process monitoring and quality evaluation activities. Int J Syst Assur Eng Maint 1(4):284–292

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Giorgini P, Mylopouls Nicchiarelli E, Sebastiani R (2002) Reasoning with goal models. LNCS-ER 2503:167–181

    Google Scholar 

  • Herrmann A and Daneva M (2008) Requirements prioritization based on benefit and cost prediction: an agenda for future research. In: IEEE international Requirements Engineering Conference, pp. 125–134, Chicago, Illinois, USA

  • Hwang CL, Yoon K (1981) Multiple attributes decision making methods and applications. Springer, New York

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Ishizaka A, Labib A (2011) Review of main developments in the analysis hierarchy process. Experts Syst Appl 38(911):14336–14345

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaiya H, et al. (2002) AGORA: Attributed goal oriented requirements analysis. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Joint Conference on Requirements Engineering

  • Kaiya H et al (2005) Improving the detection of requirements discordances among stakeholders. Requirements engineering. Springer, Berlin, pp 289–303

    Google Scholar 

  • Karlsson J, Wohlin C, Regnell B (1998) An evaluation of methods for prioritizing software requirements. Inf Softw Technol 39:939–947

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Karsak EE (2004) Fuzzy multiple objective programming framework to prioritize design requirements in quality function deployment. Comput Ind Eng 47:149–163

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kavakli E (2002) Goal oriented requirements engineering: a unifying framework. Requirements engineering. Springer, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Lai X, Xie M, Tan K-C, Yang B (2008) Ranking of customers in a competitive environments. Comput Ind Eng 54:202–214

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lamsweerde AV (2001) Goal-oriented requirements engineering: a guided tour. In: Proceedings of 5th IEEE International Symposium on Requirements Engineering, pp. 249–263

  • Lee H-S (2005) On fuzzy preference relation in group decision making. Int J Comput Math, Taylor and Francis 82:133–140

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Li RJ (1999) Fuzzy method in group decision making. Comput Math Appl-Elsevier 38:91–101

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Lin HY, Hsu PY, Sheen GJ (2007) A fuzzy based decision making procedure for data warehouse system selection. Expert Syst Appl-Elsevier 32:939–953

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liu C H (2010) A group decision making method with fuzzy set theory and genetic algorithms in quality function deployment. Qual Quant 44:1175–1189. doi:10.1007/s11135-009-9304-1

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahmood YA, Ahmadi A, Verma AK, Srividya A, Kumar U (2013) Fuzzy fault tree analysis: a review of concept and application. Int J Syst Assur Eng Maint 4(1):19–32

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mairiza D, Zowghi D (2011) Constructing a catalogue of conflicts among non-functional requirements. ENASE. Springer, Berlin, pp 31–44

    Google Scholar 

  • Nakamura K (1986) Preference relations on a set of fuzzy utilities as a basis for decision making. Fuzzy Sets Syst 20:147–162

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Oshiro K, et al. (2003) Goal-oriented idea generation method for requirements elicitation. In: 11th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, pp. 1–2

  • Pai WC (2006) A quality enhancing software function deployment model. Inf Syst Manag 19(3):20–24

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  • Prasad B (1998) Review of QFD and related deployment techniques. J Manuf Syst 17(3):221–234

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saaty TL (2008) Decision making with the analytic hierarchy process. Int J Serv Sci 191:83–98

    Google Scholar 

  • Sadiq M, et al (2010) More on elicitation of software requirements and prioritization using AHP. In: IEEE International Conference on Data Storage and Data Engineering, pp. 230–234

  • Sadiq M, Jain SK (2012) An insight into requirements engineering processes. In: 3rd International Conference on Advances in Communication, Network, and Computing, LNCSIT-Springer, pp. 313-318, Chennai, February, India

  • Sadiq M, Jain SK (2013) A fuzzy based approach for requirements prioritization in goal orientation requirements elicitation process. In: Proceedings of 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, June 27–29, USA

  • Sadiq M, Shahid M (2009) Elicitation and prioritization of software requirements. Int J Recent Trends Eng 2(3):138–142

    Google Scholar 

  • Sadiq M, Ghafir S, Shahid M (2009) An approach for eliciting software requirements and its prioritization using analytic hierarchy process. In: IEEE International Conference on Advances in Recent Technologies in Communication and Computing, pp. 799–795

  • Salinesi C, Kornyshova E (2006) Choosing a prioritization method—case of IS security improvement. In: 18th CAiSE′06, Luxemburg, pp. 51–55

  • Shibaoka M et al (2007) ER workshop. GOORE: Goal oriented and ontology driven requirements elicitation method. Springer, Heidelberg, pp 225–234

    Google Scholar 

  • Thakurta R (2012) A framework for prioritization of quality requirements for inclusion in a software project. Software quality journal. Springer, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Triantaphyllou E, Mann SH (1995) Using the analysis hierarchy process for decision making in engineering applications: some challenges. Int J Ind Eng 2(2):):35–44

    Google Scholar 

  • Voola P, Babu V (2012) Requirements uncertainty prioritization approach: a novel approach for requirements prioritization. Softw Eng 2(2):37–49

    Google Scholar 

  • Wang X-T, Xiong W (2011) An integrated linguistic-based group decision making approach for quality function deployment. Experts Syst Appl 38:14428–14438

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yamamoto K, Saeki M (2007) Using attributed goal graphs for software component selection: an application of goal-oriented analysis to decision making. In: 26th International Conference on Conceptual Modeling-ER

  • Yu ESK (1997) Towards modeling and reasoning support for early and late phase of requirements engineering. In: IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering

  • Yuan Y (1991) Criteria for evaluating fuzzy ranking methods. Fuzzy Sets Syst 44:139–157

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zadeh LA (1965) Fuzzy sets. Inf Control 8:338–353

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Zadeh LA (1975) The concept of a linguistics variable and its application to approximate reasoning (I). Inf Sci 8:199–249

    Article  MathSciNet  MATH  Google Scholar 

  • Zhu MX, Luo X-X, Chen XH, Wu DD (2012) A non-functional requirements trade off model in trustworthy software. Inf Sci-Elsevier 191:61–75

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zickert F (2010) Evaluation of the goal oriented requirements engineering methods KAOS. In: American Conference on Information system, pp. 1–9

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mohd Sadiq.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Sadiq, M., Jain, S.K. Applying fuzzy preference relation for requirements prioritization in goal oriented requirements elicitation process. Int J Syst Assur Eng Manag 5, 711–723 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13198-014-0236-3

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13198-014-0236-3

Keywords

Navigation