The ACE Framework

The ACE Framework has a language to model argumentation graphs, were the
arguments, conflicts, preferences and inferences between arguments of distinct stakeholders can be explicitly represented. Moreover, ACE algorithms formally identify impasses or consensus.  This paper presents a well conceived way of dealing with viewpoints by explicitly representing them and allowing for the identification of those arguments that have no conflicts, that is which can be said to be accepted by the different stakeholders involved.

The abstract says:

“A requirements engineering artifact is valid relative to the stakeholders of the system-to-be if they agree on the content of that artifact. Checking relative validity involves a discussion between the stakeholders and the requirements engineer. This paper proposes (I) a language for the representation of information exchanged in a discussion about the relative validity of an artifact; (ii) the acceptability condition, which, when it verifies in a discussion captured in the proposed language, signals that the relative validity holds for the discussed artifact and for the participants in the discussion; and (iii) reasoning procedures to automatically check the acceptability condition in a discussions captured by the proposed language.”

More details, see the paper: Analysis of Multi-Party Agreement in Requirements Validation

Using Viewpoints for Requirements Elicitation Interviews

Leite and Gilvaz performed an interesting experiment in using the concept of viewpoints to improve an interview assistant.  This was long ago, but it is a very nice idea.

The abstract says:

 “Requirements elicitation in the context of organizational information systems is a very hard task, being very dependent on the experience and cleverness of the team performing the elicitation. In such a context the use of interviews is common and seen as the major technique for obtaining the requirements from the actors in the organization. We have been working with the idea of a general interview assistant and our first results are promising. We elaborate on our original proposal in order to augment its assistant capability without losing its simplicity. We show how the use of viewpoint analysis improves the inference capability of our assistant.”

More details, see the paper: Requirements elicitation driven by interviews: the use of viewpoints