A specification of principles governing the design of requirement prioritisation approaches

The importance of prioritising requirements stems from the fact that not all requirements can usually be met with available time and resource constraints. Although several papers have been published in this domain, they mainly focus on descriptive research endeavours to suggest different requirement prioritisation approaches. Prescriptive research dealing with design science for a systematic and holistic understanding of the prioritisation process is still scarce. The gap motivates our research, which aims at arriving at a set of design principles that explains the form and function of a requirement prioritisation approach. We resort to a non-experimental approach using content analysis to identify and analyse articles on requirement prioritisation in order to arrive at the set of six design principles addressed in the paper. This subsequently is evaluated based on expert feedbacks to validate our design principles. We finally give a brief outlook on implications and issues for further research.