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Advancing viewpoint merging in requirements engineering: a theoretical replication and explanatory study

  • RE 2016
  • Published:
Requirements Engineering Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Compared to building a single requirements view, modeling stakeholder viewpoints and then merging them is shown to improve the understanding of the problem domain, but also very time-consuming. How has the situation changed? This paper reports our replication of a case study, where we take advantage of theoretical replication to mitigate one of the original study design’s threats and to embrace an important evolving factor, namely automated tool support for producing \(i*\) models. Our replicate study updates the prior results by showing the time saving enabled by the tool and verifies the rich domain understanding gained through viewpoint-based modeling. In an attempt to explain why viewpoints lead to richer domain understanding, we examine in a posteriori way the role that traceability plays in building individual and team-wide requirements models. Our post hoc analysis results suggest that better traceability from the sources makes team-level requirements modeling more focused, whereas the lack of traceability makes it less fruitful. Our work not only shifts the case study from an exploratory to an explanatory nature, but also proposes the integration of conflict-centric views into viewpoint merging to further improve the understanding about stakeholder requirements’ trade-offs.

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Notes

  1. Our study package [38] was updated to include the new data and analyses that we performed since the publication of our conference paper [10].

  2. The rating items were completely anonymized (i.e., containing no modeling team information) in both the interview and the survey.

  3. The interview lasted about 1 hour involving the expert and one researcher.

  4. The six individual \(i*\) models are shared in our study package [38].

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Acknowledgements

We thank all the management and staff at Scholar@UC for allowing us to conduct this case study, and especially to Ted Baldwin, Eira Tansey, Thomas Scherz, Glen Horton, Sean Crowe, James Van Mil, Carolyn Hansen, Arlene Johnson, and Elizabeth Meyer for providing valuable feedback in the stakeholder meeting and via the online new requirements survey. We also thank Wentao Wang and Chatura Samarasinghe for assisting with data analysis. The work is funded in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation (Award CCF 1350487) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Fund No. 61375053).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA

    Charu Khatwani, Xiaoyu Jin, Nan Niu, Amy Koshoffer & Linda Newman

  2. Danfoss Power Electronics A/S, Gråsten, Denmark

    Juha Savolainen

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  1. Charu Khatwani
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  2. Xiaoyu Jin
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  3. Nan Niu
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  4. Amy Koshoffer
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  5. Linda Newman
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  6. Juha Savolainen
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Correspondence to Nan Niu.

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Khatwani, C., Jin, X., Niu, N. et al. Advancing viewpoint merging in requirements engineering: a theoretical replication and explanatory study. Requirements Eng 22, 317–338 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00766-017-0271-0

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