Classifying Requirement Conflicts for Multi-Stakeholder Distributed Systems

Multi stakeholder distributed systems become more and more widespread and raise a lot of integration problems. One problem is that conflicts arise often only at runtime if a single system component is changed. The whole composition of systems then doesn’t behave like at least one of the stakeholders expects. The following paper provides a classification of the potential conflicts and gives some guidelines how to handle and overcome these conflicts using this classification. The classification is based on the fact that some parts of a system implementation can be linked to explicit stated stakeholder requirements, while others are just implementation specific parts that are not related to any explicitly stated requirement. Therefore a prerequisite for a successful conflict resolution is the traceability between requirements of a requirements model and the affected parts of an implementation model.