Assisting decision making in requirements reconciliation

Capturing a consistent, complete and valid set of requirements is a critical prerequisite for designing systems that are useful and usable. One popular technique for capturing the main chunks of functionality from the user´s point of view is the specification of use cases by the development team. While there may be agreement at this high level, there are often differences in what each stakeholder perceives as the steps of the use case description. Often the description reflects the views of one or a few dominant individuals resulting in incomplete use case descriptions that do not represent the requirements of the whole group. In our approach, known as RECOCASE as we use a CASE tool to assist requirements reconciliation, the group identify and then asynchronously capture multiple requirements viewpoints. The use case descriptions are entered in natural language and automatically processed by our system to produce a concept lattice. The concept lattice is used to reveal common ground and differences between the stakeholders. Our group process enables conflicts to be identified and resolved, where possible, using our negotiation strategies and resolution operators.