A Pragmatic View on Resolving Conflicts in Goal-oriented

Requirements Engineering for Socio-technical Systems

Ishaya Gambo

1,2 a

and Kuldar Taveter

Institute of Computer Science, University of Tartu, Estonia

Department of Computer Science & Engineering, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria

Keywords: Requirements Engineering, Stakeholders, Socio-technical Systems, Conflict Resolution, Agile Methodology.

Abstract: Requirements engineering has critical importance in the significant and successful number of software

development projects involving multiple stakeholders to deliver high-quality software-intensive systems. The

stakeholders' statements concerning the desired systems are expressed as goals to be achieved by the system

in goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE). In socio-technical systems (STS), the goals are achieved

by cooperating with man-made agents within the software-to-be and human agents. However, as stakeholders

often chase after mismatching goals subjectively, identifying and resolving conflicts in requirements becomes

an inevitable part of GORE. This paper outlines the urgent need and processes required to investigate conflicts

in the agile agent-oriented modeling (AAOM) methodology for engineering STS. We present a pragmatic

view of our proposed strategy in a framework from a deductive and qualitative research perspective. The

proposed strategy can attach stakeholders' corresponding roles to the hierarchical goal model's goals, which

naturally brings out the stakeholder's needs and intentions. Additionally, it can relate the goal models to the

most popular artifacts of agile software engineering. Thus, our pragmatic view builds upon well-established

STS, especially in utilizing AAOM methodology.

1 INTRODUCTION

Conflicts in a collaborative goal-setting process are a

genuine problem in many design systems. For

example, requirements engineering (RE) and socio-

technical system (STS) both rely on different

stakeholders' collaborative participation. In this

context, conflict is inevitable in such a setting, mainly

because the different stakeholders are prone to

disagreement regarding their goals for the system.

This situation even gets worst when viewed from a

psychological perspective requiring different people

to deal with their individual goals hierarchies as a

challenge. Clearly, these challenges are compounded

even further when these goals are considered across

multiple stakeholders with varying needs and

backgrounds, which makes conflict an indispensable

part of the process.

Goals have been introduced to RE to represent

needs and intentions by different stakeholders, which

are conceptually viewed as agents (Mirbel and

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1289-9266

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3074-7618

Villata, 2012; Rehman et al., 2010). On the one hand,

in goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE),

the different stakeholders' views on the desired

system are presented as the goals to be achieved by

the system. Consequently, requirements are treated as

goals (Eridaputra et al., 2014). On the other hand, in

STS, the goals are achieved by cooperating with

artificial and human agents included in the software

to be created. As stakeholders often pursue

incompatible goals, identifying and resolving

conflicts becomes an essential activity in the RE

process (Van Lamsweerde et al., 1998; Bendjenna et

al., 2012), especially for GORE.

In this paper's context, STS and "agent" are

notions we have introduced for understanding and

representing conflicts in requirements so that

conflicts could be more easily identified and

resolved. We define an STS as a system consisting

of diverse, active components - both human and

man-made - that collaborate in designing and

sustaining the STS. We term such active

Gambo, I. and Taveter, K.

A Pragmatic View on Resolving Conﬂicts in Goal-oriented Requirements Engineering for Socio-technical Systems.

DOI: 10.5220/0010605703330341

In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Software Technologies (ICSOFT 2021), pages 333-341

ISBN: 978-989-758-523-4

333

components as agents, which form a distributed

system.

This paper is concerned with articulating some of

our views on identifying and resolving conflicts in

RE. The paper is a continuation of the research in

Gambo (2016) and Gambo and Taveter (2021). The

focus here is on better conflict management in GORE

for STS instead of the traditional RE approach we

have investigated in previous research. Our concern

is fourfold in this paper. First, we seek to understand

and establish how software engineers can address

conflicts in stakeholders' expectations in an STS

context. Secondly, we want to understand what

software engineering (SE) activity aspects are

appropriate for addressing the first issue. Thirdly, we

seek to unveil the substantial evidence of work done

and existing gaps in the literature addressing or

attempting to address the first and second issues.

Fourthly, we seek to know what suitable method(s)

exist to help with a wide range of design problems

addressing conflicting goals in diverse dimensions,

paradigms, instances.

Therefore, this paper aims to address the main

research question: How to identify and resolve

conflicts in requirements that are expressed as goals

for different stakeholders in GORE for STS? The

main research question entails the following sub-

research questions:

• RQ1: how to categorize and rank the goals for

conflict resolution?

• RQ2: how to prioritize the goals?

• RQ3: how to resolve conflicts between the

goals in the order of their priorities?

• RQ4: how to automate conflict resolution by

a RE tool?

These questions served as the motivation for

writing this paper to further extend the research

agenda in conflict management during RE and set the

stage for future direction. We outlined how these sub-

research questions are answered in the proposed

approach and hypothesis Section of this paper.

Worthy of mentioning, the research questions are

currently under consideration. The paper seeks to

open new lines to extend our research by presenting

our conceptual views to straighten the research

agenda.

The paper begins with a section that presents the

background on GORE, STS, capacity and evidence

gaps in both GORE and STS. After that, we present

our proposed approach and hypothesis in Section 3.

Finally, we conclude the paper and provide our next

line of action as future works in Section 4.

2 BACKGROUND

In many design systems, addressing stakeholders'

goals is inevitable for a perfect, acceptable, and

satisfying system. The GORE seeks to address this,

especially in a world that relies heavily on complex

multi-stakeholder design problems.

Research on conflict management from GORE

perspectives is unorganized, fragmented, and sparse.

Much is unknown about identifying and resolving

conflicts in a more engaging way involving the

different stakeholders in a specific application

domain. In the case of GORE, the business context is

essential, especially knowing why things are done.

We call that knowing the "why" behind the "how"

from the cognitive aspects based on human-human

interaction and human-to-tool interaction. Conflict

resolution is an excellent example of requirements

negotiation techniques (Easterbrook, 1994).

Altogether, the problem of conflict resolution in

RE is aggravated further by the iterative nature of

agile SE methodologies (Version One, 2015). In

practice, the heart of agile methodology focused on

creating a collaborative participation culture that

accommodates changes and elaborates requirements

repeatedly along with the iterations in an agile SE

process (van Dijk, 2011). In this situation, conflicts in

the stakeholders' goals pose a significant threat to the

system's success.

According to De Lucia and Qusef (2010) and

Paetsch et al. (2003), the main techniques used for

resolving conflicts in requirements in agile SE

include Joint Application Development (JAD),

modeling, and prioritization negotiations with

stakeholders. However, none of the listed approaches

is efficient enough for dealing with many

requirements expressed by different stakeholders.

More broadly, we have observed that handling

conflicts in requirements in the context of agile SE

methodologies are still at an early stage

(Vijayasarathy and Turk, 2008).

Remarkably, earlier research on handling

conflicts in GORE has been reported in Easterbrook

(1994), Horkoff and Yu (2016), and Kushiro et al.

(2016). Despite much of the research in the literature

on dealing with conflicts, there is still a lack of

enough success stories in the use of existing

techniques reported so far. For example, how to make

people use these techniques is challenging, especially

for the stakeholders. Also, the need to focus more on

working with the domain experts in the resolution

process is crucial. Against these prevailing

challenges, handling conflicts in goals remains an

ICSOFT 2021 - 16th International Conference on Software Technologies

334

active research area in GORE (Horkoff et al., 2017;

Horkoff et al., 2016).

As observed in Pohl (2010), a variety of

relationships hold between goals. Such relationships

include goal decomposition relationships and goal

dependencies (Anton, 1996; Al-Otaiby et al., 2005;

Lee and Zhao, 2006). Various GORE methodologies

represent goals in decomposition hierarchies (Antón

et al., 1994; Sterling and Taveter, 2009; Van

Lamsweerde, 2009; Van Lamsweerde, 2001; Pohl,

2010). Differently from other GORE methodologies,

the AOM methodology (Sterling and Taveter, 2009;

Miller et al., 2014) represents both functional and

quality goals within one hierarchy of goals, where the

quality goals are associated with (i) the functional

goals that the quality goals are concerned with and (ii)

the roles of stakeholders responsible for the

attainment of the corresponding functional and

quality goals. The AOM methodology is enhanced in

Tenso and Taveter (2013) and Tenso et al. (2016) by

elaborating the goals at the lowest level of a goal tree

hierarchy - leaves of the goal tree - into user stories

(Cohn, 2004; Paetsch et al., 2003; Vanhanen et al.,

2009; Haugset and Stalhane, 2012), resulting in the

Agile AOM (AAOM) methodology.

2.1 Our Notion on Socio-technical

Systems

STSs are complex and collaborative in nature,

involving a more significant portion of human

involvement concerning their social status and

perspective. In this regard, STS is made up of social

relationships that are networked (Dalpiaz et al.,

2013). The complexity in STS is due to the social

actors that need to interact and the technical

components required to fulfill their goals (Paja et al.,

2013). Dealing with these goals becomes suitable

within the premise of GORE for conflict resolution.

Figure 1 describes a generic view of the STSs,

showing the various processes, the operational

environment and relating them with GORE activities.

As shown in Figure 1, the operational environment

indicates what characterizes STS situations, which

comprises conflicts, inconsistencies, negotiation, and

work system, among several others.

Cherns (1976) observed that it must perform four

subsystems functions identified by Parson (1951) for

any social system to survive. These functions include:

"attainment of the goals of the organization;

adaptation to the environment; integration of the

activities of people in the organization, including the

resolution of conflict whether task-based,

organization-based or interpersonal based; and

providing for the continued occupation of the

essential roles through socialization" (Parson, 1951).

Of importance in this sub-function is the aspect of

conflict identification and resolution. For a software

engineer, these subsystem functions are essential

requirements for designing social systems. They

could form the basis for goal management in terms of

conflict resolution.

STSs are designed to meet the business goals

(Sommeville, 2010) of human agents. In this context,

the agents pursue both functional and non-functional

goals, as shown in Figure 2. In Sterling and Taveter

(2009), a functional goal is defined as a particular

state of affairs intended by one or more active entities

- agents - in the STS and a non-functional or quality

goal as a quality requirement for achieving the

Figure 1: The STS environment and processes linking GORE.

A Pragmatic View on Resolving Conﬂicts in Goal-oriented Requirements Engineering for Socio-technical Systems

335

functional goal. This is in line with the definition of

goals in Van Lamsweerde (2009) and Van

Lamsweerde (2001), according to which goals are

either functional goals, prescribing the intended

services to be provided by the system, or non-

functional goals, also known as quality goals, which

describe the quality of service, for example, accuracy,

safety, security, usability, interoperability (Keller et

al., 1990; Van Lamsweerde, 2009). However, an

important difference between the treatment of goals

put forward in Van Lamsweerde (2009) and Van

Lamsweerde (2001) on the one hand and in Sterling

and Taveter (2009) on the other hand is that while

Van Lamsweerde (2009) and Van Lamsweerde

(2001) ascribe goals to monolithic systems, Sterling

and Taveter (2009) ascribes goals to distributed

systems consisting of many interacting agents. The

latter approach makes the treatment of conflicts a lot

easier because conflicts essentially occur between

autonomous agents.

Figure 2: View of STS showing the agents and the goals

they pursue.

Furthermore, STSs require a proper

understanding of operation and execution dynamics

(Dey and Lee, 2017). They are expected to change

human behavior (De Lemos et al., 2013). Because of

the preceding, (i) conflicting goals need to be

addressed to harmonize intentions and expectations in

future or subsequent developments; and (ii) an

appropriate methodology is inevitable for

engineering quality products acceptable by all

involved stakeholders. In our opinion, such

methodology should be able to identify and resolve

conflicting goals and expectations of these

stakeholders.

2.2 Capacity and Evidence Gap in

GORE for Conflict Resolution

Several factors motivate RE researchers and

practitioners to go after the correct, consistent, and

unambiguous requirements specifications from

stakeholders for implementing and delivering quality

systems in a development project. In particular, the

desire to deliver quality and cost-effective products is

frequently expressed, driven by deeper motivations to

ensure product acceptance and satisfaction. In most

cases, the motivation borders more on tackling the

complex issues in managing requirements and arrive

at a mutual consensus in stakeholders' goals and

expectations.

Therefore, we argue the need for a clever

technique from both researchers and practitioners that

fits GORE's scope for STS to harmonize the

psychological, social, and behavioral perspectives

during goal elicitation and elaboration. Requirements

engineers need to be interested in stakeholders'

psychological, social, and behavioral perspectives

and understand their knowledge level in capturing

their goals. We need to think about the goals to be

achieved in the context of the problem domain. When

these are addressed, it will be possible to build a

system that systematically handles conflicts.

As of 2014, conflict resolution was among the

topics reported to have not been addressed

systematically (Daneva et al., 2014) because of the

RE and SE research community's little attention. In

our opinion, we envision the need for conflict

management in goal-oriented requirements elicited

for STS in several domains by relating stakeholders'

requirements to each other within a hierarchy of goals

(Miller et al., 2014). These goals are essential for

managing conflicts among multiple (several)

viewpoints in RE (Nuseibeh et al., 1994; Robbins,

1989; Van Lamsweerde, 1998). According to Gambo

and Taveter (2021), the more the number of goals we

have in a goal hierarchy, the more requirements to

analyze and reconcile.

3 PROPOSED APPROACH AND

HYPOTHESIS

The main research method we intend to use in

addressing the research agenda in this paper is the

deductive approach in case study research in SE

(Runeson et al., 2012). This approach starts with an

existing theory, sets out a hypothesis for the research,

and finally makes observations that eventually either

confirm or reject the hypothesis. In this paper, the

theory is the proposed strategy for conflict

identification and resolution within the AAOM

methodology for STS.

ICSOFT 2021 - 16th International Conference on Software Technologies

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Figure 3 reflects the conceptual framework

describing the proposed strategy. Figure 4 overviews

the research objectives, the approach for achieving

each of the objectives, and the related research

question(s) each approach attempts to answer.

3.1 RQ1: How to Categorize and Rank

the Goals for Conflict Resolution?

To answer RQ1, the stakeholders' requirements will

be elicited. For requirements elicitation from

stakeholders, the interviewing techniques suggested

in Runeson et al. (2012) will be applied. The elicited

requirements will be represented in the form of a goal

model of AOM (Yue, 1987), a hierarchy of functional

goals assigned to the quality goals, and stakeholder

roles. As has been put forward in Tenso et al. (2016),

Tenso et al. (2017), and Tenso and Taveter (2013),

the functional goals at the level of leaves of the goal

tree are elaborated into user stories.

As shown in Figure 3, the requirements elicited

will be used to establish the hierarchy of functional

goals for the goal model of AOM. An alternative to

interviews and questionnaires could be more

innovative scenario planning approaches (Hughes et

al., 2017).

As Figure 4 reflects, the requirements filtering

technique in Butt et al. (2011) will be adapted to

Figure 3: Conceptual framework.

Figure 4: Proposed strategy.

A Pragmatic View on Resolving Conﬂicts in Goal-oriented Requirements Engineering for Socio-technical Systems

337

eliminate redundant goals from the goal tree and

categorize the goals. The relevant hypothesis (i) is

that the technique (Butt et al., 2011) is adequate for

categorizing the goals. After that, the goals

categorized will be ranked based on the Delphi

method's ranking techniques (Gambo, 2016; Keeney

et al., 2011). The Delphi method, in this case, is based

on the opinions of experts. The relevant hypothesis

(ii) is that the Delphi method can be adapted for

ranking goals and the associated user stories.

3.2 RQ2: How to Prioritize the Goals?

We will introduce the triangular fuzzy numbers for

pair-wise comparisons of goals based on a defined

ranking scale. The aim will be to establish a matrix of

data suitable for prioritizing goals using a clustering

approach. The priority will be based on the rankings,

which the stakeholders provide.

3.3 RQ3: How to Resolve Conflicts

between the Goals in the Order of

Their Priorities?

A suitable clustering algorithm will be adapted to

establish a strategy for conflict resolution partition.

Worthy of mention, the goal trees will be partition

into various clusters and assign relative weights to

each cluster by the stakeholders. The relevant

hypothesis (iii) is that the adaptation of the algorithm

(Gambo and Taveter, 2021) for partitioning the goals

of the goal tree is feasible. With the clustering

approach, the most desirable clusters and goals will

be determined.

3.4 RQ4: How to Automate Conflict

Resolution by a RE Tool?

The adapted requirements filtering technique

proposed in Butt et al. (2011), the adapted Delphi

method (Gambo, 2016; Keeney et al., 2011), and the

adapted clustering algorithm (Gambo and Taveter,

2021) will be embedded in the modeling tool. The

tool will be based on the further development of the

AOM4STS tool (Sapožnikov, 2015)

for GORE by

AOM (Yue, 1987).

The metamodeling principles outlined in Roost et

al. (2013) will be applied to ensure that the conflict

resolution tool would cater to diverse problem

domains. Consequently, the hypotheses (i-iii) stated

above will be confirmed or rejected by the empirical

observations based on real-life case studies in

http://www.tud.ttu.ee/im/Msury.Mahunnah/AOM4STS/

designing and developing STS. The rejected

hypothesis will be mitigated by searching for and

attempting a new appropriate method.

Finally, requirements from real-life case studies

will be elicited, analyzed, and reconciled to validate

our methods and tools. When doing so, completeness

and consistency tests will be adapted using recall and

precision as parameters to assess the optimality of the

proposed solutions for identifying and resolving

conflicts for requirements in GORE for STS.

4 CONCLUSION AND FUTURE

DIRECTIONS

Suffice to say; this paper seeks to advance conflict

identification and resolution strategy for GORE for

STS within the AAOM methodology. This paper's

novelty lies in the proposed strategy for identifying

and resolving conflicts in GORE for STS. The

strategy works with hierarchical goal models, where

to the functional goals are assigned the corresponding

quality goals and stakeholder roles and where the

goals at the lowest level of a goal tree hierarchy -

leaves of the goal tree - are elaborated into user

stories.

Our pragmatic view intends to provide a clear

direction and insight into which further research can

be executed in a case study and given the problem

domain to resolve conflicts in GORE for STS. We

think incorporating user stories and case study data

will help understand the underlying differences

between goal prioritization, competing interests, and

the social or organizational context. The goal will be

to ascertain if these insights can further our

understanding of broader STS principles'

applicability. Eventually, the research should have

useful implications for a range of domains.

We are optimistic that our proposed strategy will

take advantage of (i) attachment of the corresponding

roles to goals of the hierarchical goal model, which

naturally brings out needs and intentions by the

corresponding stakeholders, and (ii) relating the goal

models to the most popular artifacts of agile SE - user

stories - which will naturally enable conflict

management in the context of agile SE.

We consider the full implementation and

validation of our proposed strategy with a real case

study and real requirements originating in real

organizations for future work. For example, the

healthcare domain as a case study stands out to

provide a rich context within which our proposed

ICSOFT 2021 - 16th International Conference on Software Technologies

338

strategy can be examined. However, we are optimistic

that a contrasting case would strengthen the design

(our approach) either in terms of cultural context or

industry sector.

When implemented, the proposed strategy will

help reduce the cost of agile SE projects and save time

at the early stage of development for achieving a

high-quality software product. We are optimistic that

the strategy and tool, when implemented, will

facilitate the design of large-scale STS. Notably, it

will provide software developers with the means to

manage many goals and user stories as requirements

and identify and resolve conflicts among the

requirements.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research reported in this paper has been

supported by the Mobilitas Pluss Postdoctoral

Researcher Grant MOBJD343 awarded to the first

author.

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