Requirements Negotiation

Exchange of arguments

Is…

• Agreement upon a solution
• Advantage: the viewpoints of all parties are considered, and a win-win situation is created*
• Disadvantage: it can be time-consuming, and the compromise may not be the best solution from an objective viewpoint

Techniques

1. Win-Win approach: All stakeholders become winners
2. Interaction matrix: Visualizing overlapping and conflict about requirements.

Win-Win

1. Understand how stakeholders want to win: what is considered a benefit?
2. Raise adequate/realistic expectations by:
   1. Joint discussion about stakeholders’ expectations to identify wrong or unrealistic expectations.
   2. Putting oneself in the other stakeholders’ place to improve understanding of their viewpoints.
   3. Expectations shall be defined based on objective criteria.
   4. Expectations shall be oriented towards experience (e.g. benchmarks, expert knowledge).
3. Win-win approach is beneficial for negotiation and creative solution strategies.
4. Resolving a conflict through a decision generally leads to a win-lose situation since it is typically made in favour of a single viewpoint.

Interaction Matrix

• Each cell represents a pair of requirements and describes their interaction.
• Values of cells:
  • 1: if the conflict exists
  • 1,000: if the requirements overlap
  • 0: if the requirements are independent of each other
• Analysis:
• Calculate the sum of each column
  • If the sum=0 for a column: the req. represented by this column doesn’t overlap or conflict with any other requirements
  • overlaps= sum div 1000
  • conflicts= sum module 1000 (remainder of sum/1000)