Technical Debt Prioritization: State of the Art. A Systematic Literature Review

Background. Software companies need to manage and refactor Technical Debt issues. Therefore, it is necessary to understand if and when refactoring Technical Debt should be prioritized with respect to developing features or fixing bugs. Objective. The goal of this study is to investigate the existing body of knowledge in software engineering to understand what Technical Debt prioritization approaches have been proposed in research and industry. Method. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review among 384 unique papers published until 2018, following a consolidated methodology applied in Software Engineering. We included 38 primary studies. Results. Different approaches have been proposed for Technical Debt prioritization, all having different goals and optimizing on different criteria. The proposed measures capture only a small part of the plethora of factors used to prioritize Technical Debt qualitatively in practice. We report an impact map of such factors. However, there is a lack of empirical and validated set of tools. Conclusion. We observed that technical Debt prioritization research is preliminary and there is no consensus on what are the important factors and how to measure them. Consequently, we cannot consider current research conclusive and in this paper, we outline different directions for necessary future investigations

Exploiting a Goal-Decomposition Technique to Prioritize Non-functional Requirements

Business stakeholders need to have clear and realistic goals if they want to meet commitments in application development. As a consequence, at early stages they prioritize requirements. However, requirements do change. The effect of change forces the stakeholders to balance alternatives and reprioritize requirements accordingly. In this paper we discuss the problem of priorities to non-functional requirements subjected to change. We, then, propose an approach to help smooth the impact of such changes. Our approach favors the translation of nonoperational specifications into operational definitions that can be evaluated once the system is developed. It uses the goal-question-metric method as the major support to decompose non-operational specifications into operational ones. We claim that the effort invested in operationalizing NFRs helps dealing with changing requirements during system development. Based on\ud this transformation and in our experience, we provide guidelines to prioritize volatile non-functional requirements

Requirements Prioritization Based on Benefit and Cost Prediction: An Agenda for Future Research

In early phases of the software cycle, requirements prioritization necessarily relies on the specified requirements and on predictions of benefit and cost of individual requirements. This paper presents results of a systematic review of literature, which investigates how existing methods approach the problem of requirements prioritization based on benefit and cost. From this review, it derives a set of under-researched issues which warrant future efforts and sketches an agenda for future research in this area

A new test framework for communications-critical large scale systems

None of today’s large scale systems could function without the reliable availability of a varied range of network communications capabilities. Whilst software, hardware and communications technologies have been advancing throughout the past two decades, the methods commonly used by industry for testing large scale systems which incorporate critical communications interfaces have not kept pace. This paper argues for the need for a specifically tailored framework to achieve effective and precise testing of communications-critical large scale systems (CCLSSs). The paper briefly discusses how generic test approaches are leading to inefficient and costly test activities in industry. The paper then outlines the features of an alternative CCLSS domain-specific test framework, and then provides an example based on a real case study. The paper concludes with an evaluation of the benefits observed during the case study and an outline of the available evidence that such benefits can be realized with other comparable systems

Risk and Business Goal Based Security Requirement and Countermeasure Prioritization

Companies are under pressure to be in control of their assets but at the same time they must operate as efficiently as possible. This means that they aim to implement “good-enough security” but need to be able to justify their security investment plans. Currently companies achieve this by means of checklist-based security assessments, but these methods are a way to achieve consensus without being able to provide justifications of countermeasures in terms of business goals. But such justifications are needed to operate securely and effectively in networked businesses. In this paper, we first compare a Risk-Based Requirements Prioritization method (RiskREP) with some requirements engineering and risk assessment methods based on their requirements elicitation and prioritization properties. RiskREP extends misuse case-based requirements engineering methods with IT architecture-based risk assessment and countermeasure definition and prioritization. Then, we present how RiskREP prioritizes countermeasures by linking business goals to countermeasure specification. Prioritizing countermeasures based on business goals is especially important to provide the stakeholders with structured arguments for choosing a set of countermeasures to implement. We illustrate RiskREP and how it prioritizes the countermeasures it elicits by an application to an action case

Towards a scope management of non-functional requirements in requirements engineering

Getting business stakeholders’ goals formulated clearly and project scope defined realistically increases the chance of success for any application development process. As a consequence, stakeholders at early project stages acquire as much as possible knowledge about the requirements, their risk estimates and their prioritization. Current industrial practice suggests that in most software projects this scope assessment is performed on the user’s functional requirements (FRs), while the non-functional requirements (NFRs) remain, by and large, ignored. However, the increasing software complexity and competition in the software industry has highlighted the need to consider NFRs as an integral part of software modeling and development. This paper contributes towards harmonizing the need to build the functional behavior of a system with the need to model the associated NFRs while maintaining a scope management for NFRs. The paper presents a systematic and precisely defined model towards an early integration of NFRs within the requirements engineering (RE). Early experiences with the model indicate its ability to facilitate the process of acquiring the knowledge on the priority and risk of NFRs

A Conceptual Model of Client-driven Agile Requirements Prioritization: Results of a Case Study

ABSTRACT Requirements (re)prioritization is an essential mechanism of agile development approaches to maximize the value for the clients and to accommodate changing requirements. Yet, in the agile Requirements Engineering (RE) literature, very little is known about how agile (re)prioritization happens in practice. Conceptual models about this process are missing, which, in turn, makes it difficult for both practitioners and researchers to reason about requirements decision-making at inter-iteration time. We did a multiple case study on agile requirements prioritization methods to yield a conceptual model for understanding the inter-iteration prioritization process. The model is derived by using interview data from practitioners in 8 development organizations. Such a model makes explicit the concepts that are used tacitly in the agile requirements prioritization practice and can be used for structuring future empirical investigations about this topic, and for analyzing, supporting, and improving the process in real-life projects

Use of Dynamic Models and Operational Architecture to Solve Complex Navy Challenges

The United States Navy established 8 Maritime Operations Centers (MOC) to enhance the command and control of forces at the operational level of warfare. Each MOC is a headquarters manned by qualified joint operational-level staffs, and enabled by globally interoperable C41 systems. To assess and refine MOC staffing, equipment, and schedules, a dynamic software model was developed. The model leverages pre-existing operational process architecture, joint military task lists that define activities and their precedence relations, as well as Navy documents that specify manning and roles per activity. The software model serves as a "computational wind-tunnel" in which to test a MOC on a mission, and to refine its structure, staffing, processes, and schedules. More generally, the model supports resource allocation decisions concerning Doctrine, Organization, Training, Material, Leadership, Personnel and Facilities (DOTMLPF) at MOCs around the world. A rapid prototype effort efficiently produced this software in less than five months, using an integrated process team consisting of MOC military and civilian staff, modeling experts, and software developers. The work reported here was conducted for Commander, United States Fleet Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, code N5-0LW (Operational Level of War) that facilitates the identification, consolidation, and prioritization of MOC capabilities requirements, and implementation and delivery of MOC solutions