Do We Know Enough about Requirements Prioritization in Agile Projects: Insights from a Case Study

Requirements prioritization is an essential mechanism of agile software development approaches. It maximizes the value delivered to the clients and accommodates changing requirements. This paper presents results of an exploratory cross-case study on agile prioritization and business value delivery processes in eight software organizations. We found that some explicit and fundamental assumptions of agile requirement prioritization approaches, as described in the agile literature on best practices, do not hold in all agile project contexts in our study. These are (i) the driving role of the client in the value creation process, (ii) the prevailing position of business value as a main prioritization criterion, (iii) the role of the prioritization process for project goal achievement. This implies that these assumptions have to be reframed and that the approaches to requirements prioritization for value creation need to be extended.