Software products and solutions being developed at large, medium and small software organizations go through similar processes. Yet, due to the nature of the software developed, there are variations in the relevant parameters’ influence on requirements prioritization. The paper analyzes the requirements prioritization across 61 organizations with 106 participants. The study focuses on analyzing the common aspects and variations across large, medium and small organizations. The parameters used in practice and the order they used are identified across the organizations.

Software development, be it for customized solutions or generic products, is a continuous activity of meeting the customers’ changing requirements. The changes may be due to technology changes, expanded business needs of customers or changed government regulations. It is also possible to extend the existing solution or product for use in other areas with modifications. The changing requirements are generally met through successive releases of the products or solutions by the organizations. Large software organizations tend to work with products and solutions that are mature in terms of number of years the solutions have been used. Changes in these products or solutions may be difficult to take up and a lot of impact analysis on existing customers and existing core modules may have to be done. Incorporating technology changes may require longer times with this software. Medium and small companies generally develop software solutions specific to a single customer or a set of customers. While technology adaption is easy with this software, incorporating changing customer needs in compressed time durations becomes a challenge for these organizations. As the organizations develop initial versions of solutions and products and move towards enriching the software further, catering to multitudes of customers’ needs keeping in mind the returns on investment in the software development, the factors of business value of customer needs or requirements, when the product or solution needs to be available in the market, how many resources in terms of human and technological resources would be required, are there any components to be readily used—become the factors to be considered. Due to the limited resources in terms of time and development team and constraints of time to market, there is a need to prioritize the requirements that will be incorporated in the upcoming solutions releases. Requirements prioritization is the most significant part of software development to enable right products/solutions development in right time with optimal resources.

Computer Sciences Journal, Requirements prioritization, Size of organization, Order of parameters, Resource availability, Time to market, Impacts on core, Difficulty of implementation.