Requirements interdependencies and stakeholders preferences

Abstract

tribute that is required to have a certain value. Requirements are typically not independent of each other. For successful software projects it is essential to understand the dependencies and correlations between the underlying attributes. Due to the enormous complexity of software projects, this is a non-trivial task that became a major research topic in software engineering [2]. However, this is only part of the problem. Large software projects typically involve a large number of stakeholders with different views and expectations regarding the project. All stakeholders have to contribute to make a project an over all success. But their different preferences and expectations can easily be conflicting. The purpose of this vision paper is to introduce conjoint analysis as a tool to determine stakeholders preferences on an individual level. Conjoint analysis is well established in marketing research. We will discuss how conjoint analysis in conjunction with the knowledge of requirements interdependencies can be used to leverage the requirements engineering process.

Requirements Prioritization

“…Some techniques are especially suitable for prioritizing non-functional requirements. One such approach (originating from marketing) is conjoint analysis where different product alternatives are prioritized based on the definition of different attribute levels [22]. It should be noted that there does not seem to be a need to include all levels of all attributes (e.g.…”

“…Different methods that seem suitable for prioritizing non-functional requirements are available (e.g. Conjoint Analysis [22], and Quality Grid [36]) and it would be interesting to evaluate these empirically in industrial settings. Further, finding ways to combine such approaches with approaches more directed to functional requirements would be a challenge.…”

Stakeholders Selection for Interorganizational Systems: A Systematic Approach

“…Even though several authors focus role analysis on users and developers (or technicians) of an information system, there are others that should be studied as well [3,12,14,15]. The most used in the literature are described in Table 1 [15,16,17,18,19].…”

“…Big software projects involve a great number of stakeholders with different expectations that can be controversial [3,4]. They can also be geographically dispersed.…”

Requirements Engineering: Solutions and Trends

“…Elicitation and analysis techniques (e.g., creating scenarios and use cases, interviewing different stakeholders, extracting requirements from an existing system, synthesizing requirements from user needs and behaviors, uncovering requirements by experiments or prototypes, determining problem frames) [6,14,26,16,17] Psychological techniques for identifying weaknesses (e.g., context-free questioning, workshops, analyzing different viewpoints and interaction schemes, interaction theory, protocol analysis) [16,35] For dealing with continuous requirements changes, the key techniques are:…”