Requirements interaction in the next release problem - long version

Abstract

The selection of a set of requirements between all those pro- posed by the customers is an important process in software development, that can be addressed using heuristic opti- mization techniques. Dependencies or interactions between requirements can be defined to denote common situations in software development: requirements that follow an order of precedence, requiments exclusive of each other, require- ments that must be included at the same time, etc. This paper shows how requirements interactions affect the search space explored by optimization algorithms. Three search techniques, i.e. a greedy randomized adaptive search proce- dure (GRASP), a genetic algorithm (GA) and an ant colony system (ACS), have been adapted to the requirements selec- tion problem considering interaction between requirements. We describe the adaptation of the three meta-heuristic algo- rithms to solve this problem and compare their performance