Prioritizing Requirements: An Experiment to Test the Perceived Reliability, Usability and Time Consumption of Bubblesort and the Analytical Hierarchy Process

Software vendors often face the difficult task to deal with large amounts of requirements that enter the company every day. When dealing with this vast amount of requirements, the notion of deciding which requirements will be addressed first, and which will be addressed later, is an important decision. To support software development teams in decision-making, different prioritization techniques are discussed in previous literature. In this paper, two existing prioritization techniques called Analytical Hierarchy Processing (AHP) and Bubblesort are investigated in order to measure their outcome in terms of usability, time consumption and perceived reliability. By conducting an experiment among Dutch Master students, we discovered that Bubblesort outpaced AHP on all aspects, although this could not be supported statistically. However, based on our findings, we can conclude that there is a strong indication that Bubblesort is considered favorable compared to AHP even though it receives less attention in current literature.