Software Requirements Conflict Identification: Review and Recommendations

Successful development of software systems requires a set of complete, consistent and clear requirements. A wide range of different stakeholders with various needs and backgrounds participate in the requirements engineering process. Accordingly, it is difficult to completely satisfy the requirements of each and every stakeholder. It is the requirements engineer’s job to trade-off stakeholders’ needs with the project resources and constraints. Many studies assert that failure in understanding and managing requirements in general, and requirement conflicts in particular, are one of the main problems of exceeding cost and allocated time which in turn results in project failure. This paper aims at investigating the different reasons of requirements conflicts and the different types of requirements conflicts. It providing an overview of existing research works on identifying conflicts; and discussing their limitations in order to yield suggestions for improvement. Objective: To provide an overview of existing research studies on identifying software requirements conflict and identifying limitations and areas for improvement. Method: A comparative literature was conducted by assessing 20 studies dated from 2001 to 2014. Keywords—software requirements; requirements engineering; requirements conflicts