Software Requirements Selection with Incomplete Linguistic Preference Relations

Abstract

Software requirements (SRs) selection is a multicriteria group decision making (MCGDM) problem whose objective is to select the SRs from the pool of the requirements on the basis of different criteria. In MCGDM, different decision makers have different opinions of the same requirement so it is difficult to decide which set of SRs to implement during the different releases of the software. During the MCGDM process, decision makers may use linguistic variables to specify preferences of requirements over other requirements. In real life applications, it has been observed that sometimes decision makers cannot evaluate the SRs due to their lack of knowledge and limited expertise related to the problem domain. In this situation, incomplete linguistic preference relations (LPRs) are constructed. In literature, SRs selection with incomplete LPRs is still an unresearched problem. Therefore, to address this issue, a method is presented for the selection of SRs with incomplete LPRs. Finally, the applicability of the proposed method is explained with the help of an example.