Prioritizing Requirements Using Values and LLMs

Abstract

LLMs are increasingly used for RE activities, including stakeholder tasks (e.g., requirements identification, negotiation, or prioritization). To avoid shifting the focus to LLMs and their requirements, human values should be given greater consideration. Project-specific values provide rationales for requirements, which may increase stakeholders' agreement on prioritization. Labeling requirements with their associated human values might help the LLM prioritize in ways that align with stakeholder judgments. This paper examines the impact of explicitly labeling requirements with human values on their prioritization from two perspectives: their effect on stakeholder disagreement and on individual LLM-based stakeholder simu-lation. We measured the agreement for both cases using rank correlation. For this, we conducted an online survey with 23 participants. Using comparative prioritization, stakeholders and LLMs prioritized 31 requirements across three projects. The participants were split into two groups, one of which received requirements labeled with human values. We found that labeling requirements with their corresponding human value does not drastically change their prioritization tendencies. Additionally, we found that human value labels reduce an LLM's ability to predict a specific stakeholder's prioritization of requirements. The importance of human values in identifying and resolving conflicts should be explored further.