A cost-value approach for prioritizing requirements

Developing software systems that meet stakeholders´ needs and expectations is the ultimate goal of any software provider seeking a competitive edge. To achieve this, you must effectively and accurately manage your stakeholders´ system requirements: the features, functions, and attributes they need in their software system. Once you agree on these requirements, you can use them as a focal point for the development process and produce a software system that meets the expectations of both customers and users. However, in real world software development, there are usually more requirements than you can implement given stakeholders´ time and resource constraints. Thus, project managers face a dilemma: how do you select a subset of the customers´ requirements and still produce a system that meets their needs? The authors developed a cost-value approach for prioritizing requirements and applied it to two commercial projects