Parallel multi-objective artificial bee colony algorithm for software requirement optimization

In incremental software development approaches, the product is developed in various releases. In each release, a set of requirements is proposed for the development. Usually, due to lack of funds, lack of time and dependency between requirements, there is no possibility to develop all the required requirements. There are two conflicting objectives for choosing an optimal subset of the requirements: increasing customer satisfaction and reducing development costs. This problem is known as the next release problem (NRP) and is categorized as an NP-hard problem. Unlike the standard version of the NRP, we formulate this problem as a restricted multi-objective optimization problem. There exist metaheuristic algorithms for solving this problem performed as serials. In this paper, we introduce a parallel algorithm based on the master-slave model in order to improve the quality of the solutions. Based on the criteria of multi-objective problems, the quality of the obtained solution is compared with several metaheuristic algorithms. Two scenarios and two different datasets are used for experiments. Results indicate that the proposed method in the first scenario would highly improve the quality of solutions. Moreover, the method reduces execution time significantly through improvement in the quality of the solution in the second scenario.