Tool-supported requirements prioritization: Comparing the AHP and CBRank methods

Requirements prioritization aims at identifying the most important requirements for a software system, a crucial step when planning for system releases and deciding which requirements to implement it) each release. Several prioritization methods and supporting tools have been proposed so far. How to evaluate their properties, with the aim of supporting the selection of the most appropriate method for a specific project, is considered a relevant question. In this paper, we present an empirical study aiming at evaluating two state-of-the art tool-supported requirements prioritization methods, AHP and CBRank. We focus on three measures: the ease of use, the time-consumption and the accuracy. The experiment has been conducted with 23 experienced subjects on a set of 20 requirements from a real project. Results indicate that for the first two characteristics CBRank overcomes AHP while for the accuracy AHP performs better than CBRank, even if the resulting ranks from the two methods are very similar. The majority of the users found CBRank the overall best method. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.