Conflict-Oriented Requirements Restructuring

Requirements engineering necessitates the analysis of relationships among the requirements of system stakeholders. Poor analysis of these relationships has led to numerous failures. To improve such analysis, researchers have created models and methods for recording, analyzing, and modifying stakeholder requirements. However, the critical aspect of representing and reasoning about stakeholder interactions remains relatively implicit. Herein, we explicitly define: (1) a meta-model for capturing stakeholder requirements, (2) transformations for restructuring requirements which remove stakeholder conflicts, and (3) strategies for interactively guiding the restructuring process. To validate the utility of our approach, we have applied it to the analysis of a distributed meeting scheduler. We conclude that the meta-model can provide substantial automated support for the removal of stakeholder conflicts through its requirements restructuring transformations.