What is Negotiation Process

As part of Requirements Engineering, “Elicitation” is the phase where an analyst collects information from the stakeholders, clarifies the problems and the needs of the customers and users, tries to find the best solutions, and makes its planning on what software system will be developed. During elicitation, to get well-defined requirements, a consensus among the different stakeholders is needed. There are several elicitation techniques in the literature; however every technique faces the same problem: each stakeholder has different requirements and priorities, which potentially produces conflicting situations. Therefore, this situation points out Requirements Prioritization as a relevant research area to define the requirements’ level of importance. Nevertheless, often the strategies implemented to solve conflicts among stakeholders are inadequate; for example, weighting requirements can be problematic because sometimes weights are inconsistent and lead to confusion about which are the most essential customer requirements. The prioritizing process must hold stakeholder satisfaction considering high-priority requirements first. However, practical experience shows that prioritizing requirements is not as straightforward task as the Literature suggests. In any case, clearly defining a way of balancing preferences on requirements is essential to the elicitation process. The remainder of this chapter is structured as follows. Section 2 describes a conceptual framework to describe several prioritization proposals, which are characterized in Section 3. Future trends are presented afterwards.