Advancing viewpoint merging in requirements engineering: a theoretical replication and explanatory study

Compared to building a single requirements view, modeling stakeholder viewpoints and then merging them is shown to improve the understanding of the problem domain, but also very time-consuming. How has the situation changed? This paper reports our replication of a case study, where we take advantage of theoretical replication to mitigate one of the original study design's threats and to embrace an important evolving factor, namely automated tool support for producing models. Our replicate study updates the prior results by showing the time saving enabled by the tool and verifies the rich domain understanding gained through viewpoint-based modeling. In an attempt to explain why viewpoints lead to richer domain understanding, we examine in a posteriori way the role that traceability plays in building individual and team-wide requirements models. Our post hoc analysis results suggest that better traceability from the sources makes team-level requirements modeling more focused, whereas the lack of traceability makes it less fruitful. Our work not only shifts the case study from an exploratory to an explanatory nature, but also proposes the integration of conflict-centric views into viewpoint merging to further improve the understanding about stakeholder requirements' trade-offs.