Kwan Hong Lee  Seok-Won Lee

game theory requirements engineering software ecosystems requirements negotiation

With changing software industry structure, the emerging concept called Software Ecosystems (SECO) has various challenges that software engineers have to overcome. In marketdriven software product development, they should have the capability to offer high value products to their own business and their customers in order to being competitive. Each stakeholder’s perspectives and interests should be reconciled in terms of requirements so that engineers can offer high value products through requirements selection. Existing works have just mentioned the need of requirements negotiation between stakeholders without proposing detailed guidelines or practice. In this work, a systematic Requirements Negotiation process is proposed to resolve conflicts of interests of stakeholders in SECO. The interests of stakeholders are analyzed based on goal-based requirements engineering. The rationale of requirements conflict is structured for management. A stepwise requirements negotiation process aims at resolving requirements conflict by applying game theory concepts based on self-interested behaviors of stakeholders.