Conflict Detection and Resolution for Product Line Design in a Collaborative Decision Making Environment

摘要

Ensuring that the non-functional requirements (NFRs), of a system are satisfied is an essential task in software development. However, this task is complicated by the fact that many NFRs conflict with each other from multiple perspectives. It is essential to resolve conflicts collectively in a collaborative decision making process since stakeholders often disagree on how conflicts should be resolved. In this paper, we describe a method for dividing high-level NFR conflicts within a product line into more manageable sub-problems. Stakeholders make use of an argumentation based collaborative decision support system to determine which design alternatives provide the best trade-offs between NFRs. Finally, we present an empirical study in which the aforementioned system was used to resolve a single instance of an NFR conflict across 3 members of a product line. It shows that the system is effective in resolving conflicts in a collaborative decision process.