ABSOLUTE SCALES TO EXPRESS STAKEHOLDER VALUE FOR IMPROVING SUPPORT FOR PRIORITIZATION

摘要

Given the reality of resource constraints, software development always involves prioritization to establish what to implement. Iterative and incremental development methods increase the amount of prioritization required and introduce the need to support dynamic prioritization to identify high stakeholder value. Ideally the needs of all the stakeholders are considered in the priority decision-making and there might be negotiation amongst them. In this paper we argue that the current prioritization methods often lack adequate support for the prioritization process. Specifically that many methods fail to appropriately structure the data for stakeholder value, which results in explicit stakeholder value not being captured. This problem is often compounded by a lack of support for handling multiple stakeholder viewpoints. We propose an extension to an existing prioritization method, impact estimation, to move towards better capture of explicit stakeholder value and catering for multiple stakeholders. A key feature is the use of absolute scale data for stakeholder value. We use a small industry case study to evaluate this new approach. Our findings argue that it provides a better basis for supporting priority decision-making over the implementation choices for requirements and designs.