Prioritizing Requirements in Agile Development: A Conceptual Framework

The advance of technology and business needs have triggered user requirements to evolvealmost every day.It is therefore impossible to fulfill the requirements at once. Agile methods have been introduced to mitigate such issues by implementing user requirements incrementally and iteratively. Selecting a group of prominent requirements to be implemented in iterationsis considered as essential in agile development. This can be achieved by performing continuous requirements prioritisation. Practitioners however are confronted with difficulties in making decisions about which requirements should be considered for implementation at the inter-iteration period. This paper proposes a conceptual framework that outlines the contributing factors and how these factors affect the process and the final product of requirements prioritisation process in agile methods. Thefactors were identified by reviewing the related work. The data were analysed by using content analysis. The proposed conceptual framework aims to guide practice and future research on effective requirements prioritisation process thatcan produce high quality requirementswhich meet the needsof the intendedusers.