Prioritizing Tasks in Software Development: a Systematic Literature Review

Task prioritization is one of the most researched areas in software development. Given the huge amount of papers written on the topic, it might be challenging for IT practitioners to find the most appropriate tools or methods developed to date to deal with this important issue. To overcome this problem, we conducted a systematic literature review. The main goal of this work is to review the current state of research and practice on task prioritization among IT practitioners and to individuate the most effective ranking tools and techniques used in the industry. We can make a number of observations based on the results of this work. Firstly, we found that most of the task prioritization approaches developed to date involve a specific type of prioritization strategy— bug prioritization. Secondly, the most recent works investigate task prioritization in terms of “pull request prioritization” and “issue prioritization.” Thirdly, the most frequently used metrics for measuring the quality of a model are f-score, precision, recall, and accuracy