Using organized objectives to structure arguments for collaborative negotiation of group decisions in software design

Nowadays, driven by industry globalization and Internet revolution, modern software design is a group decision-making process which is often carried out by a team of stakeholders across geographical, disciplinary and temporal boundaries. These stakeholders have to negotiate collaboratively to achieve consensual agreements on their design decisions based on their competing objectives and different preferences. The identification, organization and negotiation of these objectives and preferences need to be well handled by the software design teams. To effectively support collaborative negotiation of group decisions, one of the critical requirements is to structure the negotiation arguments of multiple decision makers for multiple decision tasks, in order to make sure that all stakeholders have a common ground to effectively make rational group decisions for software design process.To satisfy this requirement, our approach is to develop a new framework of organizing objectives and preferences and structuring the arguments using this organized information. This framework is built based on a synthesis between an objective hierarchy and a generic argument structure. Enabled by this synthesis framework, our approach specifies how the arguments can be generated based on stakeholders' proposals, objectives, criteria and preferences, and then exchanged amongst multiple stakeholders. This synthesis framework also helps us build the systematic models of analyzing the arguments relationship and evaluating the arguments based on the level of the objectives achievement. Two case studies are presented for applying this new approach of structuring negotiation arguments in real-life software design processes. The results of these case studies have validated our hypothesis and justified our research approach.This research is an original attempt to develop a theoretical approach to use organized stakeholders' objectives and preferences to structure collaborative negotiation arguments. This approach synthesizes applicable knowledge from decision science and social studies and leverages their advantages in the domain of software engineering. It overcomes the restriction and challenges of the existing approaches and defines a process with detailed guidance to improve the negotiation quality of software design team and the compatibility of stakeholders’ arguments. These contributions will eventually refine the ways of undertaking negotiation processes and resolve design conflicts in engineering domains.