An Automatic Requirements Negotiation Approach for Business Services

Abstract

Organizations now resort to service-orientation as it enables them to quickly create and offer new business services (BSs) or optimize existing ones. In many cases, organizations must cooperate to offer such services so as to concentrate only on their core business. An initial phase to the design of a novel BS concerns the determination of the BS's functional and non-functional requirements. The respective research approaches exploit goal models to specify and elicit such requirements. However, while it is easy to reach an agreement for the functional requirements, this is not true for the non-functional ones. First, as the involved stakeholders may have different requirements and expertise level for particular non-functional aspects. Second, as a BS's non-functional performance is critical for distinguishing among functionally-equivalent BSs of other competing organizations. Thus, the stakeholders must negotiate over the BS's nonfunctional requirements. However, such a negotiation may take considerable time and needs the active stakeholder involvement in terms of alternative offers for the conflicting requirements. To this end, this paper proposes a broker-based BS negotiation framework that can automatically determine the non-functional requirements of the required BS. This framework takes as input a functional goal model as well as the stakeholder requirements in terms of utility functions on the non-functional performance of the required BS functional goal and its sub-goals, and can propose an overall solution that is balanced and consistent across the goal model levels and satisfies as much as possible all the stakeholders.

Software Requirements Negotiation: a Systematic Literature Review

“…It starts with the de nition of requirements and nishes with the production of executable business process. [25]. In conclusion, we found that 11 studies (S7, S18, S22, S23, S24, S30, S37, S44, S45, S61, and S66) did not clearly state the SRN technique that their studies adopted.…”

“…An additional observation was that 82% of the selected studies adopt different techniques for conducting SRN activities. However, we discovered that most of the techniques are hybridbased and composed of the basic SRN models [25,32,46]. The process models used are winwin, easywinwin, spiral, broker-based, and so on.…”

Reliable Requirements Engineering Practices for COVID-19 Using Blockchain

“…Merits Demerits [76] "Proposes a broker-based BS negotiation framework that can automatically determine the non-functional requirements"…”

“…Through this voting process, all the requirements will be tagged as valid or invalid [75]. It will also distinguish between functional and non-functional requirements [76]. In the context of requirement engineering, blockchain can maintain a sequence of records, research, authorized information, transactions, negotiations, and other supporting activities and organizations [77], which as a result will increase the rate of successful projects.…”