Software Requirements Negotiation: a Systematic Literature Review

Abstract Software requirements negotiation (SRN) is one of the most essential stages of software requirements engineering. SRN involves the stakeholder's interaction to reach a mutual understanding of the requirements for developing a software project. The increased research interest in requirements engineering has resulted in huge literature in the SRN domain. There is a need to investigate the broad of techniques, processes, and evaluation mechanisms used in the SRN research community. This study aims to examine and identify the existing methods, processes, evaluation mechanisms, quantity of publications, publication trends and demographics shaping SRN research domain. To accomplish our aim, we used an evidence-based systematic approach, and 67 relevant studies were ultimately chosen from the search process based on the formulated research questions. Our study result shows broad and promising SRN techniques that include agent-based negotiation, TAICOS, wikiwinwin and winbook. However, we found that the existing SRN techniques suffer from limitations that have stakeholders' communication gaps, interface issues to non-technical users, decision-making, and managing requirements changes. Moreover, our study found that 63% of the selected studies stated their SRN processes, with 22% adopting the basic SRN processes in winwin model. Five evaluation mechanisms were discovered, with case study and experiment most adopted by the selected studies with 44% and 30%, respectively. In conclusion, although research on SRN is recently gaining some traction, the works in the domain are insufficient. Concrete proposals are needed to improve SRN in software requirements engineering research domain.