Software Engineering
Research shows interconnecting requirements boosts software prioritization from user feedback
A new approach groups feature requests into thematic clusters and discovers dependency relationships, improving the accuracy of deciding which requirements to develop next.
Deciding which software features to build next is computationally complex, but end-user feedback offers a practical way to guide these choices. A new study builds on earlier work to show that linking requirements together—rather than treating them in isolation—yields smarter prioritization decisions.
The Challenge#
Requirements prioritization remains one of software development's toughest problems. Teams must select the most valuable subset of potential features from many candidates, a task known to be NP-hard. User comments from app stores provide rich signals about what customers want, and prior research (ReFeed) successfully extracted priority signals from the quantifiable properties of feedback messages tied to each requirement. However, earlier methods ignored how requirements might relate to or depend on one another.
Connecting Requirements Through Feedback#
The enhanced approach clusters requirements into topic-coherent groups by analyzing user feedback from mobile app stores. This grouping uncovers natural connections between features—showing, for example, that one capability might logically depend on another being completed first. The system automatically generates "requires" relationships among candidate requirements based on these topical clusters.
Testing the Method#
Researchers evaluated their enhancement on 94 real-world requirements prioritization cases drawn from four production applications. The new technique that incorporates interconnectedness outperformed the baseline ReFeed approach. Beyond improving the prioritization accuracy itself, the discovery of dependency relationships between requirements also strengthened search-based release planning algorithms—making it easier for teams to construct feasible development schedules that respect prerequisite requirements.
Why It Matters#
By recognizing that software requirements don't exist in a vacuum, this work points toward more realistic and effective planning. Teams can better understand not just what users want, but how features fit together—enabling more coherent product roadmaps and reducing the risk of building features whose prerequisites haven't yet been delivered.