Conflicts Management in Goal-Oriented Requirements Engineering: Socio-Technical Systems Perspective

Abstract

Goal Oriented Requirements Engineering (GORE) is a fundamental methodology for developing high-quality software systems. However, addressing conflicts in GORE to make the development process of Socio-technical systems (STSs) easier in meeting the business goals, especially in an agile development methodology, is challenging. This thesis focused on conflict management in GORE from the STS perspective. The goal is to explain goal formulation and how conflicts can be identified and resolved in the user stories related to the specified goal(s). The thesis presents a case study where functional goals are developed in an agile development methodology. We followed software engineering design principles to build a software tool that captures the goals and users’ stories and then identifies and resolves conflicts in the user stories of those goals using the analytical decision-making technique. The result provides a general overview of the problem domain, which shows the effects of the user and business sides’ motivations during conflict management and, as a result, presents the resolved user stories for each goal. Our results provide both analytical and theoretical explanations. It is concluded that considering human and company or organization motivation in a development project is one of the key activities for conflict management because it makes it easier to decide between conflicting user stories. At the same time, human roles (team) are one of the critical points to gaining conflict-fee requirements.