Identifying and Resolving Conflicts in Requirements by Stakeholders: A Clustering Approach

Ishaya Gambo, Ishaya Gambo, Kuldar Taveter

2021

Abstract

Conflicts in requirements are genuine analysis and design problems that require appropriate methods to reconcile different views, goals, and expectations by stakeholders. The research question addressed in this paper is how can conflicts in requirements elicited from different stakeholders be solved to avoid failure of the resulting software-intensive system? We propose a framework for conflict identification and resolution based on expert-based and clustering techniques for conflict resolution. The research method is a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods by employing clustering and expert-based techniques for conflict resolution. The results demonstrate two essential features of conflict resolution in requirements engineering: (i) the ability to cater for a large volume of requirements in a multi-stakeholder setting; and (ii) the ability to effectively make precise decisions for minimizing conflicts between prioritized sets of requirements expressed by the stakeholders. The framework and the interactive system have been validated in analyzing requirements for a pharmacy information system. The contributions of the paper are an expert-based framework for resolving conflicts and an interactive system that empirically proves the adequacy of the framework. The main threat to validity is that the developed framework is yet to be validated in other problem domains.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Gambo I. and Taveter K. (2021). Identifying and Resolving Conflicts in Requirements by Stakeholders: A Clustering Approach. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE, ISBN 978-989-758-508-1, pages 158-169. DOI: 10.5220/0010526901580169

in Bibtex Style

@conference{enase21,
author={Ishaya Gambo and Kuldar Taveter},
title={Identifying and Resolving Conflicts in Requirements by Stakeholders: A Clustering Approach},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,},
year={2021},
pages={158-169},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0010526901580169},
isbn={978-989-758-508-1},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering - Volume 1: ENASE,
TI - Identifying and Resolving Conflicts in Requirements by Stakeholders: A Clustering Approach
SN - 978-989-758-508-1
AU - Gambo I.
AU - Taveter K.
PY - 2021
SP - 158
EP - 169
DO - 10.5220/0010526901580169