Application of AHP to Requirements Analysis

We describe a group of related approaches to quantitative evaluation and prioritization of system requirements and proposals. In formulating requirements for new systems, analysts face difficult tasks of selecting between alternative requirement decompositions, identifying questionable or low priority requirements, eliminating requirements that add unnecessary costs, projecting cost impact of the requirements and then evaluating alternative system design proposals against the stated requirements. We seek approaches that require modest investments of time and can be applied even at the early stages of the requirements formulation process. We show that the Analytical Hierarchy Process can be applied to provide such evaluation mechanisms and illustrate our approach with a detailed example.