Conditional preferences in software stakeholders' judgments

In reality, many of the stakeholders' decisions about their desirable requirements can be dependent on other internal or external factors. Such dependencies entail conditionality between the requirements that have been defined, e.g., a requirement is desirable for the stakeholders only if a certain condition is met or some other requirements are excluded. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that tackles the challenge of capturing and processing software stakeholders' conditional preferences. Our proposal extends the Stratified Analytic Hierarchical Process (S-AHP) method that we have previously introduced. S-AHP is built on top of the Analytic Hierarchical Process method, which performs a pairwise comparison of stakeholders' preferences. The current main framework for handling conditionality is TCP-nets, which suffers from the inability to handle hierarchical structure of comparisons and cycles in dependencies defined by the condition al requirements. Also, TCP-nets is primarily developed for qualitative preferences and its quantitative extensions cannot completely capture quantitative relative importance. We show that our framework is able to address these shortcomings of TCP-nets while preserving many of its advantages.