Collaborative Requirements Engineering: Bridging the Gulfs Between Worlds - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 358

and selective attention. Although multiple representations augment our ability to
develop shared understanding, within any one conversation we can only concen-
trate on a limited quantity of information. The focus of attention within stakeholder
groups has to be managed during requirements conversations; furthermore, conver-
sation is only part of the process of generating mutual understanding. This leads to
the application of discourse theory and Clark's common ground to management of
requirements conversations.

5 Managing RE Conversations

The first principle for establishing common ground is to see the world from the
viewpoint of other stakeholders. The ability to imagine the thoughts and intentions
of others is probably a unique human attribute, and is known as the theory of mind
[ 14] . Briefly, the theory of mind in social psychology describes our ability to con-
struct models of other people and their intentions. Knowledge of others is first-order
theory of mind; this can be extended into a second order as a projection about beliefs
other individuals hold about their friends, and so on. Application of the metaphor
is simple: project one's imagination into the viewpoint of other stakeholders. The
metaphor can be extended to consider the viewpoint of the software machine by
treating it as another agent. This can provide a useful perspective for modelling
by inquiring what knowledge the software system will need to execute a particu-
lar process for achieving a user's goal. A meta-model for managing RE dialogues
is illustrated in Fig. 4. This abstracts the basic cycle of conversation and reflection
which can be mapped to more specific RE processes illustrated in Fig. 2.
User-stakeholder goals are the starting point for analysis following the accepted
GORE-style approaches. Modelling user agents, goals, soft goals and tasks with

Develop
personal
common
ground

Develop
personal
common
ground

individual
mental
models

individual
mental
models

shared
common
ground

shared
common
ground

Develop
mutual
under-
standing

Generate
ideas and
solutions

Generate
ideas and
solutions

document
representations

Record
common
ground

artefacts

Fig. 4 Meta-model of
common ground development