Abstract
Stakeholder goals identified during requirements elicitation are usually informal and incomplete statements about a system considered for development. There are numerous approaches for capturing such informal models. For example, we have found the EasyWinWin requirements negotiation method to be an efficient way for attaining consensus among the success-critical stakeholders. The WinWin negotiation model captures stakeholder goals as win conditions, issues, options and agreements. When such a model has to be transformed into more formal representations, quality becomes particularly important. Approaches for validating such informal models can increase quality and provide guidance for further refinement of requirements. Inspection is a proven approach to identify defects and is also applicable to early life cycle artifacts. This paper reports on an empirical study demonstrating the usefulness of an inspection technique for requirements negotiation models. The study employs a conservative economic model, which considers the effect of defect slippage during development on defect detection benefits from inspection. The main finding of the study is that inspection is an economic validation technique for requirements negotiation models. There are, however, certain limitations that need to be studied in more detail.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all inspectors participating in the study, all stakeholders taking part in the EasyWinWin negotiations and all graduate students supporting the research team: Martin Weninger, Markus Reiterer, Lorenz Froihofer and Dietmar Winkler. Paul Grünbacher's work on EasyWinWin was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (grant J-1764-INF). Michael Halling has been supported by the Austrian Science Fund (grant P-14128-COSIMIS). Stefan Biffl was funded in part by the Austrian Science Fund (grant J-1948-INF).
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Halling, M., Biffl, S. & Grünbacher, P. An economic approach for improving requirements negotiation models with inspection. Requirements Eng 8, 236–247 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-002-0155-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-002-0155-8