Visualization of Agreement and Satisfaction in Distributed Prioritization of Market Requirements

When developing packaged software which is sold “off-the-shelf” on a worldwide market place, it is essential to collect needs and opportunities from different market segments and use this information in the prioritization of requirements for the next software release. This paper presents an industrial case study where a distributed prioritization process is proposed, observed and evaluated. The stakeholders in the requirements prioritization process include marketing offices, which are distributed around the world. A major objective of the distributed prioritization is to gather and high-light the differences and similarities in the requirement priorities of the different market segments. The evaluation through questionnaires show that the stakeholders found the process useful. The paper also presents the novel approaches to visualize the priority distribution among stakeholders, together with measures on disagreement and satisfaction. Product management found the proposed charts valuable as decision support when selecting requirements for the next release.