Recognition of Hidden Factors in Requirements Prioritization Using Factor Analysis

Requirements prioritization is one of the important activities in the requirements engineering process, which aims in identifying the most fitting requirements for a specific release of a system. In order to systematically perform this activity, many approaches have been introduced so far. Most of these prioritization techniques are based on the attributes such as value, cost, and risk. We believe that there are several other unobserved factors in the requirements prioritization process, which have significant impact on prioritization result itself. This paper aims to describe variability among the observed attributes in terms of fewer unobserved factors using factor analysis method. The proposed method not only reduces the number of attributes by combining two or more of them into a single factor, but also tries to identify groups of inter-related attributes, to see how they are related to each other. The proposed method has a significant potential to practically bring into play, especially in large projects to mitigate the number of attributes involved in requirements prioritization phase and simplify the decision making process.