Supporting the Requirements Prioritization Process Using Social Network Analysis Techniques

Requirements management and prioritization is a complex process that should take into account requirements value for customers, cost of implementation, available resources, requirements interdependencies, system architecture and dependencies to the code base. In this paper we present how Social Network Analysis can be used in order to improve software requirements management and the prioritization process. The presented model is based on meta-networks where basic entities are combined for representing requirements priorities, interdependencies, required knowledge, etc.. The analysis of the model is illustrated with sample data and a number of examples.