Requirements Prioritization Challenges in Practice Summary

Requirement prioritization is considered as challenging activity because projects faces time and
resource constraints, lack of knowledge to assign and modify priorities and lack of techniques for
prioritizing requirements in managers.

Research design
This is about case organizations and its research methods. In this study, they used Qure project.
Qure project. The goal was to find out how to develop products that meet user and customer
needs. Methods used were focus group study whereby its goal was to identify how, and which
phases of development work companies prioritize requirement in practice. And in-depth
interviews whereby its goal was to posses detailed information about the current practices and
have a better understanding from project standpoint in requirement prioritization.

Results
Five Discoveries were made that gave a description to the current practice in requirement
prioritization in the case companies. And these are.
Requirement prioritization is a vague concept. This means that terms like requirement
prioritization and priority have several varying meanings which brings in confusion and
misunderstanding.
Prioritization practices are informal and depend on individuals. Requirements are prioritized
mostly based on developers experience.
Requirements are prioritized in many phases. Priority decisions in requirement definition
process are supposed to be made iteratively despite of their importance in the current stage.
Developers have less knowledge about customer preferences. This is so because there is no
direct contact between the developers and the end users and that there are no common ways to
communicate end user’s information through the development process.
Priority of a requirement depends on several factors. Priority of a requirement mostly has
three main factors which are business, customers and implementation of which they seem to
contain other factors within them.

Challenges
Therefor, from those five findings, three main challenges are realized.
How to know which are the relevant factors? It is unclear which standpoints should be taken
into consideration.
How to get correct information? Lack of ways to communicate priority information which
might also be twisted or wrong.
How to combine information from different sources? Lack of systematic ways to combine
market and customer preferences.