RE Conflict Management

Note

Falls under Evaluation and Agreement in model-based RE

One goal of the requirement engineering process is to establish sufficient agreement among the stakeholders regarding the already known requirements for the system.

• Identifying conflicts
• Analyzing conflicts
• Resolving conflicts
• Documenting conflict resolutions
  Those activities are mainly supported by the following:
• Win-Win approach
• Interaction matrix

Conflict

Exists if the needs and wishes of different stakeholders regarding the system contradict each other or if some needs and desires cannot be considered

Conflict in Requirements Engineering

Risks: unresolved conflicts may cause:

• Stakeholders to no longer support the development of the system
• A failure of the development of the system
  Conflicts should be treated as a source of:
• new ideas
• innovative requirements
  To resolve conflict:
• Involve the relevant stakeholders to resolve
• Involve software architects, developers, and testers to be trained to report (not to resolve) detected conflicts.
• Both jointly should resolve the conflicts

Using Goals and Scenarios

• First, identify conflicts at the goal level as far as possible, then document, analyze, and resolve them at that level as far as possible.
• Conflict analysis benefits from using scenarios: a scenario can clarify conflict by describing the sequence of interactions in which the conflict occurs.
• Scenarios can be used to discuss how to reduce the conflict or avoid it altogether.
• Stakeholders can evaluate different scenarios and choose the ones that offer the best solution.

Activities

1. Identifying Conflicts
2. Analyzing Conflicts
3. Resolving conflicts
4. Documenting conflict resolutions