A Method for Capturing and Reconciling Stakeholder Intentions Based on the Formal Concept Analysis - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 171

The proposed technique aims at solving those problems by the following
approach:
- The proposed method is based on the mathematical foundation of lattice theory,
which is especially appropriate to structure the relationships among entities of
goals, sub-goals and stakeholders.
- The proposed method is bottom-up and only requires the information from
stakeholders.
As a whole, we can conclude that the proposed method significantly improve the
conventional techniques.
Modeling Capability . The proposed method introduced a rather simple semantics
in the order relations, i.e. inclusion of attributes, in order to ensure the order relation.
This is a two-sided problem. If we introduce more semantics into the model, like
many goal-oriented techniques, the model could increase modeling capability, but
can be complicated and decidability of order relation may suffer.
Analysis Capability . We developed measures to analyze the structural properties
of the goal lattices. Among them, we found that the commonality and variabil-
ity properties and direct/indirect order relation are especially useful to analyze the
structure of goals and prioritize the goals from certain stakeholders' point of view.
Secondly, we discuss the proposed method in comparison with conventional
techniques including stakeholder analysis and goal-oriented.
Conventional stakeholder analysis mainly uses the stakeholder matrix which is
useful to group the intentions together. However, it lacks the capability to hierar-
chically structure the intentions. Thus, the proposed method is useful to find the
structure among goals and sub-goals from the viewpoints of stakeholders.
Goal-oriented approaches have been well developed and provide rich techniques
in structuring goals by developers. However, it is necessary to structure the goals
from stakeholders' intentions in a bottom-up manner. Conventional techniques are
mostly intended to decompose goals in top-down manner. The presented method
relies on the intentions of stakeholders, and generates the structure of stakeholder
intentions in a bottom-up manner, which is a major advantage over conventional
techniques.
9 Conclusion
We presented a method to structure the intentions of stakeholders in terms of the
relation among the goals, sub-goals and stakeholders, to generate the system goal
lattice, and to analyze the structural properties of the system goal lattice.
The advantage of the presented method is its mathematical foundation of FCA
(Formal Concept Analysis) based on the lattice theory. The presented method
enables to elaborate the hierarchical structure among the goals, sub-goals and
stakeholders from the intentions of stakeholders in a bottom-up manner.