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Goal-oriented approaches detect priorities as the base attribute to handle
conflicting goals. Formal techniques and heuristics are proposed for detecting
conflicts and divergences from specifications of goals/requirements and of domain
properties [16]. The major difference with respect to our work is that consistency of
judgements is not guaranteed.
In [1] a goal-oriented approach is presented to manage conflicts in COTS-based
development. This work aims at developing a selection process of how to identify and
manage conflicting interests between costumers and vendors in order to support
COTS decision-making. This process demonstrated that conflicts may arise when
there is a mismatch between requirements and features. So, they have proposed a set
of matching patterns to support the evaluation of how features match requirements.
This works differs from ours because it proposes a set of alternative solutions at
design level and we propose a ranking of alternatives (concerns) at requirements
level.
CORA (Conflict-Oriented Requirements Analysis) incorporates requirement
ontology and strategies for restructuring requirements transformations as a mean to
reduce or remove conflicts [19]. This work deals with technical inconsistency and
stakeholders conflicts, and ours deals with technical conflicts.
In [14] AHP is used to compare requirements pairwise according to relative value
and cost where stakeholders are considered as having equal relevance. In our case a
ranking process is used to establish stakeholders' degree of importance using the AHP
and then we compare this method with the classical weighted average method.
In Win-Win Spiral Model [8], QARCC [9] is an exploratory knowledge-based tool
used for identification of potential conflicts among quality attributes. QARCC
diverges from ours, e.g.,: (i) instead of a knowledge-based tool we present a
mathematical technique; (ii) QARCC fails to provide a method to evaluate quality of
stakeholders' judgements. In our case, a consistency index is used to identify
inconsistent judgement thus suggesting to the decision maker judgement revision; (iii)
QARCC is based on key stakeholders identification; we use stakeholders' priority
ranking to identify different degrees of importance among them (for priority criteria).
Fewer stakeholders may result in less overhead and inconsistencies but erratic
judgements may have more impact in the system.
7 Conclusions and Future Work
A rigorous technique to support conflict management at the AORE level has been
presented. The technique uses a particular multi-criteria analysis method, the AHP, to
find, given a set of alternatives and a set of decision criteria, the best alternative for a
given problem. Such a technique is not only useful in the context we have described
here, but it looks very promising as a tool to support architectural choices during the
software architecture design.
We also compared the AHP with a classical weighted average method and the
results proved that selecting the appropriate MCDM is always a question of trade-offs
between advantages of each method. In this work we noticed that AHP ensures more
psychological robustness in classifying the concerns, logical consistency and better
interpretability at the expense of longer time to formulate and calculate the results. In
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