A Model For Prioritizing the Needs of Software and Information Systems, Using the AHP Method

Requirements prioritization is one of the important topics in information and software system architecture. In software system, after determining the requirements that must be satisfied by the system, these requirements must be prioritized based on their importance. Then, time and available resources of project are assigned to the requirements based on their priorities. This makes better use of available time and resources of the project. Then, the obtained product at the time considered for project implementation strives to satisfy the requirements with higher priority. The requirements of a software system are divided in to two major groups, i.e., functional and qualitative. The first is associated with the ability of accomplishment and the other to quality of accomplishment of system duties. Requirements prioritization is applied to the quantitative requirements. In this paper, via Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP), a general framework for prioritization of qualitative requirements of information and software system has been proposed. A number of major criteria such as cost, value, time, penalty and risk have been considered and ultimately an example of inventory systems has been shown.