The WinWin Approach: Using a Requirements Negotiation Tool for Rationale Capture and Use

A highly cost-effective approach for rationale capture and management is to provide automated support, and capture the resulting artifacts of the process by which software and system requirements and solutions are negotiated. The WinWin process model, equilibrium model, and collaborative negotiation tool provide capabilities for capturing the artifacts. The MBASE software process model provides an approach for using and updating the rationale artifacts and process to keep it in a win-win state. Supporting requirements negotiation with attaching rationale can have a high impact on all phases of development by enabling much better context for change impact analysis as the increasingly frequent requirements changes arrive. The WinWin approach involves having a system's success-critical stakeholders participate in a negotiation process so they can converge on a mutually satisfactory or win-win set of requirements. The WinWin framework in essence captures stakeholder-oriented objectives, options and constraints in the form of a decision rationale.