Reasoning about Stakeholder Groups for Requirements Negotiation based on Power Relationships

With the increasing complexity and uncertainty in requirements engineering (RE), the impact of power relationships between stakeholders becomes critical to the success of requirements engineering process, especially in requirements negotiation to resolve conflicting requirements. In this paper, we make use of the basic principles of requirements negotiation and define reasoning rules to reason about stakeholder groups for requirements negotiation, based on an extended i∗ modeling framework that represents the power relationships between stakeholders in RE. We derive decision-makers and supporter groups of conflicting requirements using the reasoning rules based on power relationships between stakeholders, and further reason about representative stakeholders from the supporter groups to participate in requirements negotiation activity. We describe the reasoning process and provide a concrete case of reasoning about stakeholder groups for requirements negotiation based on the extended i∗ model