Multi-objective ant colony optimization for requirements selection

The selection of a set of requirements between all the requirements previously defined by customers is an important process, repeated at the beginning of each development step when an incremental or agile software development approach is adopted. The set of selected requirements will be developed during the actual iteration. This selection problem can be reformulated as a search problem, allowing its treatment with metaheuristic optimization techniques. This paper studies how to apply Ant Colony Optimization algorithms to select requirements. First, we describe this problem formally extending an earlier version of the problem, and introduce a method based on Ant Colony System to find a variety of efficient solutions. The performance achieved by the Ant Colony System is compared with that of Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure and Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm, by means of computational experiments carried out on two instances of the problem constructed from data provided by the experts.

Ant Colony Optimization for Requirement selection in Incremental Software development

This proposal shows that ACO systems can be applied to problems of requirements selection in software incremental development, with the idea of obtaining better results of those produced by expert judgment alone. The evaluation of the ACO systems should be done through a compared analysis with greedy and simulated annealing algorithms, performing experiments with some problems instances