Software Requirements Prioritisation: A Systematic Literature Review on Significance, Stakeholders, Techniques and Challenges

As one of the gatekeepers of quality software systems, requirements' prioritization (RP) is often used to select the most important requirements as perceived by system stakeholders. To date, many RP techniques that adopt various approaches have been proposed in the literature. To identify the strengths, opportunities, and limitations of these existing approaches, this paper studied and analyzed the RP field in terms of its significance in the software development process based on the standard review guidelines by Kitchenham. By a rigorous study selection strategy, 122 relevant studies were selected to address the defined research questions. Findings indicated that RP plays a vital role in ensuring the development of a quality system with defined constraints. The stakeholders involved in RP were reported, and new categories of the participating stakeholders were proposed. Additionally, 108 RP techniques were identified and analyzed with respect to their benefits, prioritization criteria, size of requirements, types in terms of automation level, and their limitations; 84 prioritization criteria were disclosed with their frequency usages in prioritizing the requirements. The study revealed that the existing techniques suffer from serious limitations in terms of scalability, the lack of quantification, and the prioritization of the participating stakeholders, time consumption, requirement interdependences, and the need for highly professional human intervention. These findings are useful for researchers and practitioners in improving the current state of the art and state of practices.