What is it about?

This paper shows formally why pair-wise comparisons to identify conflicting requirements are flawed. Essentially, they are unable to identify conflicts emerging between groups of requirements. This is showcased with a practical example too.

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Why is it important?

Identifying and removing unnecessary conflicting requirements is key to ensure a design space that contains affordable solutions. This paper shows that existing methods for such early identification are fundamentally flawed, since by being built on pair-wise comparison approaches, they are only able to identify a minimum subset of potential conflicts. This paper sets a scientific foundation to set course in a different direction in terms of developing conflict identification methods.

Perspectives

This paper contributes to the theory of systems engineering, to finding its scientific foundations. It provides a fundamental reason of why so many system developments are put in jeopardy because of emerging undetected conflicting requirements at some point of their life cycle. The results of this paper should serve the research community to discard, or at least challenge, existing methods for early identification of conflicting requirements and develop new ones that overcome the fundamental flaw of pair-wise comparisons in this context.

Dr Alejandro Salado
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: The Concept of Order of Conflict in Requirements Engineering, IEEE Systems Journal, March 2016, Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE),
DOI: 10.1109/jsyst.2014.2315597.
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