An Integrated Approach to Prioritize Requirements using Fuzzy Decision Making

TLDR: This paper employs individual fuzzy decision making to capture the subjectivity encapsulated in individual concerns of stakeholders with respect to goals and constraints associated with conflicting requirements and obtains an integrated set of requirements using Fuzzy Decision-Making that would satisfy all the stakeholders.

Abstract: The success of a system depends upon how intensively it accomplishes its intended purpose by meeting all stakeholders' concerns pertaining to conflicting requirements such as cost, schedule, performance etc. Various stakeholders may have their individual and consolidated concerns over conflicting requirements. Individual concerns facilitate a stakeholder to obtain preference orderings of conflicting requirements and consolidated concerns assist developer to obtain consensual preference ordering that would satisfy all stakeholders. As the concerns over the conflicting requirements are vague, uncertain and subjective in nature, this paper employs Fuzzy Decision Making for modeling the vagueness, haziness and non-specificity associated with the requirements. Finally a case study using an agent oriented system is presented to illustrate the application of the methodology. associated with the requirements. Secondly, these methods don't take into account the goals and constraints associated with the conflicting requirements that may lead to stakeholders' dissatisfaction. This paper employs individual fuzzy decision making to capture the subjectivity encapsulated in individual concerns of stakeholders with respect to goals and constraints of conflicting requirements and hence facilitates them to obtain preference orderings of conflicting requirements that reflects their individual concerns. Secondly this paper utilizes multi-person decision making to resolve diverse concerns of various stakeholders. These integrated set of requirements would satisfy all stakeholders and also assist the developer to ascertain the essential requirements of stakeholders within limited resources. The application of the methodology is illustrated using Agent oriented Paradigm (AOP) that is a recent way of representing the requirements of a system in terms of agents. An Agent-oriented System (AoS) typically involves a large number of agents playing different roles, interacting with each other to achieve individual and common goals (11). Software agents are computer programs that act autonomously on behalf of their users across open and distributed environments to solve growing number of complex problems. In an agent-oriented system, various stakeholders may differ over the implementation issues of agents. In addition, they may have their own individual and consolidated concerns associated with goals and constraints associated with conflicting requirements e.g. cost of accomplishing a system may be a conflicting requirement for various stakeholders. They may have their own priorities over cost in terms of goals and constraints associated with it. Goal associated with the cost may be to enhance the return of an organization but not at the stake of quality of service. This paper takes into account goals and constraints associated with the conflicting requirements and obtain an integrated set of requirements using Fuzzy Decision-Making that would satisfy all the stakeholders. The organization of the paper is as follows: Section II introduces Fuzzy Decision-Making. Section III utilizes Fuzzy Decision-Making to deal with individual and consolidated concerns of stakeholders to prioritize requirements. Section IV illustrates the proposed methodology using an agent oriented system.