A Cognitive Psychology Approach for Balancing Elicitation Goals Nadina Martinez Carod Alejandra Cechich Universidad Nacional del Comahue Departamento de Ciencias de la Computacion Buenos Aires 1400. 8300 Neuquen, Argentina (namartin, acechich}@,uncoma.edu.ar Abstract goal specification techniques have been discussed for resolving stakeholders' divergences. The difference between success and failure in a On the other hand, goals are useful for organizing project depends on the initial identification and and justifying software requirements [1]. For example, construction of goals, which are the mechanism of a requirement specifies the way a goal should be identfying software requirements. The result of accomplished by a proposed system. Furthermore, an applying goal-oriented methods, which are top-down interactive process performed by people involved in an requirements analysis, is in most cases a goal graph. elicitation process, which is in essence heterogeneous, Goal graphs are implementedfrom customers needs as acquires the system's goals. Thus, it is a fact that the initial goals to requirements specifications as final specification of common goals is rather complicated. goals. Their analysis includes negotiation as an Some goal-oriented methods are based on a refinement important issue, which becomes extremely dfficult, as approach, resulting in an AND/OR graph. The clients often cannot know exactly what they need. To construction and analysis of AND/OR graphs is a good overcome this situation, aiming at improving alternative for goal management, and implies a stakeholder's negotiation, we reduce the gap of negotiation process in accepting goals. First a set of misunderstanding between them by the use of cognitive main goals must be selected. These goals are refined science. The objective of this paper is to introduce a and decomposed into sub-goals, which are decomposed cognitive approach to help in the solution of into new sub-goals. The process continues until final discordances among stakeholders when applying goal- goals are reached. They become into requirement oriented methods. We depict our proposal with a real specifications. In AND/OR graphs, root nodes are the case study. initial goals and can be considered as the needs of the customer. Goals are connected with their sub-goals by Keyword: Goal Oriented Analysis, Cognitive directed edges. A parent goal can have one or more Informatics, Requirements Elicitation sub-goals. Two types of decomposition can be used, the AND-decomposition and the OR-decomposition. In 1. Introduction AND-decomposition the parent goal can only be satisfied if all of the sub-goals are satisfied. By the In software development, the elicitation process and contrary, in an OR-decomposition a parent is satisfied particularly the acquisition of software requirements if any of the sub-goals is satisfied. The objective of the are critical success factors. Elicitation is about learning links between goals is capturng situations where goals the needs of users, and communicating those needs to positively or negatively support other goals; therefore system builders [10]. One of the most important goals AND/OR graphs may be used to capture goal st hem . . refinement links. Furthermore, a conflicting link of th elctto itofnouwhthepblms. An between two goals is introduced when satisfaction of although the literature suggests the elicitation as a simple process [17], experience in real projects turns it one of them may prevent the other from being satisfied. in rather complicated as stakeholders have different The goal prioritisation process must be quick, s . h. . trustworthy and as straight as it can be possible. The viewpoints, ol are high-level objectives of theyg system. They play a prominent role in the assessment of goal ranking may help in the Requirements Engineering (RE) process, and many organization of successive releases, specifying which Proc. 6th IEEE Int. Conf. on Cognitive Informatics (ICCI'07) D. Zhang, Y. Wang, and W. Kinsner (Eds.) 1-4244-1327-31071$25.OO ©2007 IEEE 232