Systematic Literature Review on the Extent of Conflict Identification and Resolution Research and Practice in Requirements Engineering of Socio-technical Systems: Where are we now?

Abstract

Conflict identification and resolution are fundamental requirements engineering (RE) issues that can positively affect many application areas, especially in sociotechnical systems (STSs). For this reason alone, requirements conflicts are a crucial area of study for the RE community, particularly as stakeholders have different views and concerns and frequently pursue mismatching goals. However, despite the increasing studies in theoretical and experimental research for identifying and resolving conflicts during the RE process, a systematic study for evaluating and aggregating the extent of research efforts from both practitioner and research perspectives is missing. Therefore, this research provides a comprehensive review of the significant efforts undertaken along this line of research by investigating and summarizing findings in the context of the formulated research questions. This is with the view of having a clearer and broader perspective on how conflicts in the RE process are handled in practice to improve the quality of STSs and achieve stakeholders’ satisfaction. We use search terms with relevant keywords to identify the main research relating to conflict identification and resolution from journal articles, conference papers, seminars, symposiums, book chapters, and IEEE bulletins. Overall, we extracted 1720 papers from the literature search after running several queries, and after applying the exclusion, inclusion, and quality criteria, 66 articles were selected for the research. The study proves that some research has been done on conflict management, but there are fewer practices in conflict resolution than identification. The results also found that stakeholders are not actively involved in decision-making. Also, the existing practices have a bunch of drawbacks, such as requiring expertise and not being completely automated. It is concluded that, even though there is some downside to current practices, they are actively used in practice to discover and handle conflicts. Moreover, new techniques have been implemented to identify and/or resolve conflicts in RE and also to avoid existing practice gaps.