Using Constraint Programming for the Automatic Detection of Conflicts in Quality Requirements

Requirements negotiation is quite an interesting, ongoing research area. Current requirements engineering models usually propose a negotiation process with similar methods and goals. Unfortunately, only a few have partial automatic support. In this paper, we revisit one of the most mature models, Boehm’s Win–Win model. Win–Win is a qualitative, process–oriented model so that it is specially suited to be used at the early stages of requirements engineering, when knowledge about requirements is still vague, but not for quantitative, product–oriented contexts where a more precise, exact knowledge about the requirements is needed. In this paper, we present a proposal to extend and refine Win–Win in order it can be used in product–oriented contexts. The main benefit of our approach is that the same conceptual model for requirements negotiation can be used during all software development process, instead of using different models in different phases.