Determination of the Value of Requirements Risk
Abstract
Requirements prioritization is undeniably an important activity in requirements engineering to rank requirements for a specific release due to budget, time and other constraints. On top of the objective of requirements prioritization mentioned, requirements prioritization is also actually aids in producing a better quality of requirements since the requirements defects are detected and solved during the process of requirements prioritization. There are a numbers of existing techniques available and newly proposed techniques for requirements prioritization. However, the issues faced in the existing requirements prioritization are still remain unsolved. Most of the requirements prioritization techniques are also not evaluated for its efficiency and effectiveness in the industry. Some researchers claimed that there is no best fit techniques for requirements prioritization currently. In addition, the existing techniques are focusing on stakeholders and the importance of requirements in requirements prioritization. We found limited study focusing on the aspect of risk for requirements prioritization. To our best knowledge, there is none study conducted to find out the level for requirements risks. We are motivated focus on the aspect of requirements risk and to calculate the value for each of the requirements risk.
In this paper, we reported a study on computing the level for each of the requirements risks. We conducted a study from the industry to obtain the value of the requirements risks. A total of 70 respondents, from 10 different software companies, were involved in our study. A background check was done in prior to confirm for relevancy.
Our respondents were required to provide us with the values for each of the requirements risks and we further utilize it into a formula to calculate the severity of requirements risk, adopted from risk management. We found that functional requirements are more risky than non functional requirements.The value computed for each of the requirements risks can be served in requirements prioritization ranking.
Keyword: Requirements Engineering, Requirements Risk Assessment, Requirement Risks Ranking, Requirements Prioritization
