Abstract
This paper describes the development and evaluation of a framework that combines expert-based and clustering methods for resolving conflicts in requirements elicited from stakeholders. The purpose of the framework was to identify and resolve conflicts among expectations by multiple stakeholders that often arise during the requirements elicitation phase. By means of qualitative and quantitative research approaches, face-to-face oral interviews, quantitative surveys, brainstorming sessions, and focus groups, scenarios were generated with stakeholders of a given problem domain. Our approach was implemented within an interactive system that empirically supports the adequacy of our framework with the involvements of experts and other stakeholders of the chosen problem domain. In addition, we presented a dataset of requirements with their weight scales that formed the basis for resolving conflicting views by stakeholders by applying scientific criteria. The framework was validated in a real-life case study. The results demonstrated 85.71% of correctly clustered instances of requirements, based on which the experts agreed that the interactive system was good enough for resolving conflicting subjective views in requirements analysis. The research performed has the two-fold threat to validity, which suggests (i) the need to adequately capture and harmoniously represent the views by different stakeholders in a multicultural and multidisciplinary domain and (ii) the need to validate the framework in other real life case studies in different domains. The research performed has a high potential for reducing software development costs and saving time at the early stage of the development of software products.
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Acknowledgment
The authors would like to thank all the experts at the Pharmacy Department of the OAUTHC who provided invaluable input to the framework for resolution. The research work reported in this paper has received funding from the European Social Fund via the IT Academy programme and from the Mobilitas Pluss Postdoctoral Research grant MOBJD343 by the Estonian Research Agency awarded to the first author.
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Gambo, I., Taveter, K. (2022). Stakeholder-Centric Clustering Methods for Conflict Resolution in the Requirements Engineering Process. In: Ali, R., Kaindl, H., Maciaszek, L.A. (eds) Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering. ENASE 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1556. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96648-5_9
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