During the software development process, the decision maker (DM) must master many variables inherent in this process. Software releases represent the order in which a set of requirements is implemented and delivered to the customer. Structuring and enumerating a set of releases with prioritized requirements represents a challenging task because the requirements contain their characteristics, such as technical precedence, the cost required for implementation, the importance that one or more customers add to the requirement, among other factors. To facilitate this work of selection and prioritization of releases, the decision maker may adopt some support tools. One field of study already known to solve this type of problem is the Search‐Based Software Engineering (SBSE) that uses metaheuristics as a means to find reasonable solutions taking into account a set of well‐defined objectives and constraints. In this paper, we seek to increase the possibilities of solving the Next Release Problem using the methods available in Verbal Decision Analysis (VDA). We generate a problem and submit it so that the VDA and SBSE methods try to resolve it. To validate this research, we compared the results obtained through VDA and compared with the SBSE results. We present and discuss the results in the respective sections.

The activity of prioritizing software requirements should be done as efficiently as possible. Selecting the most stable requirements for the most important customers of a development company can be a positive factor considering that available resources do not always encompass the implementation of all requirements. There are many quantitative methods for prioritization of software releases in the field of search-based software engineering (SBSE). However, we show that it is possible to use qualitative verbal decision analysis (VDA) methods to solve this type of problem. Moreover, we will use the ZAPROS III-i method to prioritize requirements considering the opinion of the decision-maker, who will participate in this process. Results obtained using VDA structured methods were found to be quite satisfactory when compared to methods using SBSE. A comparison of results between quantitative and qualitative methods will be made and discussed later. The results were reviewed and corroborated with the use of performance metrics.