Maintainability-based requirements prioritization by using artifacts traceability and code metrics

Requirements prioritization is a fundamental activity during software system maintenance. Prioritize requirements, in fact, means to determine the ordering in which requirements have to be considered in a given planning or maintenance activity. Most of the existing requirements prioritization techniques and tools focus on user and non/functional requirements, while only few attempt exists to consider how requirements are actually implemented, if they are implemented. In this demonstration paper, we present a tool that prioritizes (change) requirements by using artifacts traceability information, to locate the requirements implementation, and a set of code-based metrics, to measure several properties (e.g., coupling, size, scattering) of the requirements implementation. The tool, hence, determines the requirement ordering with respect to how these requirements are implemented in a subject software system. © 2013 IEEE.