So, You Think You Know Others' Goals? A Repertory Grid Study

Recent research in requirements engineering (RE) has generated a number of notations for modeling stakeholders' goals and the relationships between them. However, the community has paid little attention to how stakeholders can develop consensus on the meaning of the goals in a goal model. In this article, we show how to use the repertory grid technique (RGT) to compare stakeholders' terms when they describe their softgoals (goals whose satisfaction can't be established in a clear-cut sense). We conducted a pilot study for a nonprofit organization to demonstrate our approach. The study shows that the technique can readily identify agreements and mismatches in stakeholders' terminologies and can be performed without preliminary training or specific resources

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