A novel approach for the next software release using a binary artificial algae algorithm

In software incremental development methodology, the product develops in several releases. In each release, one set of the requirements is suggested for development. The development team must select a subset of the proposed requirements for development in the next release such that by consideration the limitation of the problem provides the highest satisfaction to the customers and the lowest cost to the company. This problem is known as the next release problem. In complex projects where the number of requirements is high, development teams cannot choose an optimized subset of the requirements by traditional methods, so an intelligent algorithm is required to help in the decision-making process. The main contributions of this study are fivefold: (1) The customer satisfaction and the cost of every requirement are determined by use of fuzzy numbers because of the possible changing of the customers’ priorities during the product development period; (2) An improved approximate approach is suggested for summing fuzzy numbers of different kinds, (3) A new metaheuristic algorithm namely the Binary Artificial Algae Algorithm is used for choosing an optimized subset of requirements, (4) Experiments performed on two fuzzy datasets confirm that the resulted subsets from the suggested algorithm are free of human mistake and can be a great guidance to development teams in making decisions.

Selection and Prioritization of Software Requirements Applying Verbal Decision Analysis

During the software development process, the decision maker (DM) must master many variables inherent in this process. Software releases represent the order in which a set of requirements is implemented and delivered to the customer. Structuring and enumerating a set of releases with prioritized requirements represents a challenging task because the requirements contain their characteristics, such as technical precedence, the cost required for implementation, the importance that one or more customers add to the requirement, among other factors. To facilitate this work of selection and prioritization of releases, the decision maker may adopt some support tools. One field of study already known to solve this type of problem is the Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) that uses metaheuristics as a means to find reasonable solutions taking into account a set of well-defined objectives and constraints. In this paper, we seek to increase the possibilities of solving the Next Release Problem using the methods available in Verbal Decision Analysis (VDA). We generate a problem and submit it so that the VDA and SBSE methods try to resolve it. To validate this research, we compared the results obtained through VDA and compared with the SBSE results. We present and discuss the results in the respective sections.