Browse Theses

This dissertation summarizes the results of applying several formal modeling capabilities to the WinWin system, and identifies the system improvements resulting from the analysis. WinWin is a groupware support system driven by the WinWin spiral process model. It enables multiple stakeholders to collaborate and negotiate requirements in an incremental and evolutionary way. It uses "win conditions" to capture individual stakeholder objectives. "Issues" are provided by the system to capture sets of conflicting win conditions along with "options", which are possible resolutions to issues. An "agreement" adopts options chosen by stakeholders to resolve an issue and to reconcile the win conditions involved in that issue. These artifacts provide scalable structure for a groupware tool and accommodate changes to requirements.Initial use of WinWin uncovered several anomalous usage situations. These made it feasible and important to formally model these artifacts and operations to provide solid foundations of the system. The research described in this thesis models the WinWin requirements negotiation infrastructure and dynamics. It involves formal descriptions of multiple views for the WinWin requirements negotiation system, including win condition interaction in the requirements space view, artifacts and their relationships, artifact life cycles and the equilibrium model. The results showed that these models improved the system in three primary ways: (1) fully understand the lower-level interactions of the system's features; (2) prevent aberrant behavior of the system; and (3) provide process guidance for the users to avoid problem situations and efficiently reach win-win solutions. While these models are formulated, a big challenge for a multi-view framework is to maintain consistency. This thesis also presents how the relationships among the various views of WinWin are determined in order to reconcile them into an integrated model. The reconciliation methodology can be generalized and applied to other multi-view frameworks.