Study of Prioritization Techniques Using Students as Subjects

In many software development projects there are more candidate requirements. Most projects are also constrained by budget and time; therefore it is often difficult to implement all requirements that have been elicited for a system. For prioritization purposes, many approaches have been proposed so far to help the process. Several empirical studies have been conducted to analyze characteristics of the available approaches, but their results are often difficult to compare. In this paper, a study designed at evaluating two requirements prioritization techniques, AHP and numeral assignment technique is discussed. The study used students as subjects to prioritize requirements from an estate agency system and a library information system. Two groups of students, one from requirements engineering classroom and another group consists of research students participate in the study. The results reaffirm previous study that AHP gives more accurate and more informative result than the numeral assignment technique.