Investigating Impact of Business Risk on Requirements Selection Decisions

In market-driven software product development, requirements that can potentially go into a product or a product release represent different kinds of investments. Requirements differ in the type of value that they provide and level of risk associated to investing in them. In this paper we investigate how business risk associated with different requirement types is considered by the decision makers and how it affects requirement selection decisions. The results of the conducted case study indicate that due to lacking methods for handling the requirements business risk, requirements with low level of risk are preferred over other type of requirements such as innovations and architectural improvements.