R. Plösch. Ch. Körner, M. Schimpelsberger: Suitability of Tool-Supported Prioritization of Software Requirements for Students, 38th International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T 2026), Florence, Italy, July 20-22, 2026
In software development, it is common that not all envisioned requirements can be implemented within the available resources. Requirements prioritization is often based on intuitive judgment, leading to software systems that may be perceived as suboptimal by stakeholders. It is therefore important for Software Engineering students to learn to systematically prioritize functional requirements. This research presents a CVE tool for requirements prioritization in software projects that offers a practical, method-agnostic approach. CVE stands for cost and value engineering. The tool supports multiple prioritization methods and additionally enables modeling of dependencies between requirements, ensuring their consideration in the prioritization process. The suitability of our design artifact for software engineering students was evaluated through an experiment, supplemented by a questionnaire. Our CVE tool was generally rated as suitable by our students, and our proposal to consider requirements dependencies in the prioritization process was also well-received. However, the study also highlights the need to streamline the tool’s usability for dependency management, as this feature was difficult for our students to use. Additionally, while prioritizing requirements without dependencies can yield good results, additional learning materials are needed to better support the process of defining requirements’ dependencies.