Requirements negotiation using multi-criteria preference analysis

Many software projects have failed because their requirements were poorly negotiated among stakeholders. Reaching agreements of negotiated requirements among stakeholders who have different concerns, responsibilities, and priorities is quite challenging. Formal (fully-automated) approaches of requirements negotiation require significant efforts of knowledge representation and validation, whereas informal (manual) approaches do not provide systematic methods of requirements negotiation. This paper proposes a novel light-weighted, yet systematic requirements negotiation model, called "Multi-Criteria Preference Analysis Requirements Negotiation (MPARN)" to guide stakeholders to evaluate, negotiate, and agree upon alternatives among stakeholders using multi-criteria preference analysis theory. This eight-step MPARN model was applied to requirements gathered for an industrial-academic repository system. The result showed that the MPARN model assisted stakeholders to have unbiased aspects within a requirements negotiation in a light-weighted way and increase stakeholders' levels of cooperation and trust by measuring each stakeholder's preference and value function explicitly through a step-by-step process.