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Top1. Introduction
Requirement engineering is a crucial stage in the development of any software project and a very intricate part of this phase is Requirement Prioritization (RP). It is indispensable to complete a project without any failure if the requirements are not prioritized correctly. For success of any project it is important to confine, examine and prioritize requirements, which largely depends upon acceptance of stakeholder’s requirements, concerns and criteria’s (Davis, 2003; Mead, 2006; Perini et al., 2007). Most software projects have more candidate prerequisites that can be acknowledged within available budget, time constraints, stakeholder expectations and technical constraints. For effective requirement prioritization it is imperative to consolidate distinctive aspects by both stakeholders and developers to help in decision-making process. In past, a large of requirement prioritization techniques have been proposed AHP (Saaty, 2004), Cumulative Voting (Chatzipetrou et al., 2010), Weiger’s method (Wiegers, 1999), $100-Test (Leffingwell & Widrig, 2000), Numerical Assignment (Sommerville & Sawyer, 1997), Cost Value approach (Karlsson & Ryan, 1997) etc., most of which takes the assumption that the requirements are independent of each other which may lead to erroneous priority list of the requirements.
The major factors which can influence this decision of requirement prioritization may include inter-relationships among requirements, inability to deal with complex situations, unaccepted or biased final ranking. Inter-relationship among requirements is a crucial factor which must be considered before assigning priority. There are only a few algorithms that consider the dependency amongst the requirements e.g. IGA (Tonella et al., 2013), EVOLVE (Greer & Ruhe, 2004), DRANK(Shao et al., 2017) etc. To ponder upon, there are only few algorithms that consider that the opinions of both stakeholders and developers are important for prioritizing the set of requirements, which is again a bad league to follow. The stakeholders define the real face value of the project while the developers most importantly know about the hidden interiorities of the requirements in terms of technicality, complexity and resource requirements and their availability. So, building up the right project requires the involvement of both the stakeholders and developers. Years of literature (Achimugu et al., 2014; Perini et al., 2013; Ruhe et al., 2003; Savolainen, 2011) recommend that a large portion of the prioritization approaches experiences following issues: unfit to acknowledge imperative of dependency, are time consuming, are sensitive – a solitary mistake may influence entire prioritization order, can't resolve logical inconsistency, unfit to deal with complex situations, questionable final ordering and biased ranking. Due to this, software development is still a greatest challenge for project team to produce successful software fulfilling stakeholder’s scope and objective within the predicted time and cost (Kerzner, 2018). Requirement prioritization is a cost effective mechanism that plays an important role in estimating cost and time of a project. To further save cost, decrease time for product development efforts must be made in the direction of reusing potential requirements. Requirements reusability can be defined as the capability to use in project requirements that have already been used before in other projects. It helps software organization optimize resources and reduce errors. The latest requirement management tools consider requirement reusability as a part of their important functions for e.g.: DOORS, JAMA, P&PM. (Re-Magazine, n.d.). “In software engineering particularly in requirements engineering (RE), research has shown that crowd-sourcing has the potential to aid requirements elicitation by facilitating the discovery and involvement of a wider range of crowd contributors and users”(Hosseini et al., 2014). To efficiently capture requirements an emerging business model of crowd-sourcing is used in this study.