Conflict Management in the Collaborative Description of a Domain Language (S)

Abstract

The identification and specification of the requirements of a software system is a difficult task that has the goal of obtaining requirements as correct and complete as possible. It is extremely important that Requirements Engineers understand a domain language in order to write high-quality requirements. Moreover, they must describe (and discuss) the language in a collaborative way in order to consider the different points of view of all stakeholders to assure that the resulting requirements will have more chances to meet their needs. However, collaborative construction implies the occurrence of conflicts that are unavoidable because of ambiguity, overlapping and misunderstanding natural language descriptions. This article relies on the Language Extended Lexicon in order to describe the application domain. Although it is a semi-structured glossary and this characteristic helps to reduce the conflicts, our experience shows that conflicts arise anyway. Thus, in order to mitigate this problem, this article presents a catalogue with a set of conflicts that could appear during a collaborative construction of the Language Extended Lexicon and proposes alternatives for their resolution.