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Continuous requirements management for organisation networks: a (dis)trust-based approach

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Abstract

Recently, viewpoint resolution methods which make conflicts productive for requirements engineering have gained popularity in organisational information systems. However, when extending such methods beyond organisational boundaries to inter-organisational social networks, sociological research indicates that a delicate balance of trust in individuals, confidence in the network as a whole, and watchful distrust becomes a key success factor. We capture these relationships in the so-called TCD (Trust–Confidence–Distrust) approach and demonstrate how this approach can be supported by a dynamic requirements engineering environment that combines the structural analysis of strategic dependencies and rationales, with the interaction between planning, tracing, and communicative action. An example drawn from an ongoing case study in entrepreneurship networks illustrates our approach, complemented by a brief sketch of a prototypical implementation of a simulation environment based on our methodology.

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Notes

  1. For example, trust values in Coleman's model [15] are real-valued subjective probabilities.

  2. Strictly speaking, a little bit of second-order logic is needed for the axiomatisation of situations, an issue which should not concern us here.

  3. While not visible in Fig. 8, initial values of fluents like the level of trust are specified in the SR model.

  4. If a task satisfies a goal, one idea would be to insert a test action corresponding to the goal as the final action of the procedure representing the task.

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Acknowledgments

This work is part of the international TROPOS initiative on agent-oriented requirements-driven software engineering. The Aachen TROPOS project is supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft in part within its Focused Research Programme on Socionics, and in part by Collaborative Research Centers 427 (Media and Cultural Communication) and 476 (Cooperative Computer-Aided Chemical Engineering, IMPROVE). Thanks are due to our sociology partners Christiane Funken, Martin Meister, and Lutz Ellrich as well as to our SFB colleagues Ralf Klamma and Thomas List for their contributions to the empirical and sociological aspects of the TCD approach, as well as to the repository management foundations and traceability aspects. Thanks also to John Mylopoulos and Eric Yu for discussions of the relationship of this work to the model-checking approach of formal TROPOS

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Informatik V, RWTH Aachen, Ahornstr. 55, 52056 , Aachen, Germany

    Günter Gans, Matthias Jarke, Stefanie Kethers & Gerhard Lakemeyer

  2. Schloss Birlinghoven, Fraunhofer FIT, 53754 , Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Matthias Jarke

  3. CSIRO-CMIS, Clayton South, VIC 3769, Australia

    Stefanie Kethers

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  1. Günter Gans
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Correspondence to Matthias Jarke.

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Gans, G., Jarke, M., Kethers, S. et al. Continuous requirements management for organisation networks: a (dis)trust-based approach. Requirements Eng 8, 4–22 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-002-0163-8

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