Not All Conflicts Are the Same: An Empirical Study of Requirement Conflicts in Practice

Paper in proceeding, 2024

Requirement conflicts commonly occur in software development, especially for complex systems that involve many requirements. Resolving these conflicts can be very time-consuming and costly. Moreover, due to the contextual nature of requirements conflicts, resolution strategies are needed that can be tailored to a specific conflict and its context. Currently, there is a lack of research on what categories of conflicts exist and how practitioners manage these conflicts. To enable more adaptive resolution strategies, the aim of this research is to map what types of requirement conflicts are encountered and how they are managed in practice. Through an interview study with eleven participants from seven companies in six domains, we identified three levels of conflict types that connect to four types of causes. These types and causes revealed two main dimensions that impact conflict management. One dimension is related to the nature of the conflict, either technical or social, and the other dimension is related to the nature of the requirement scope, which is either too constraining or too undefined resulting in stakeholders making assumptions that create conflicts. We found that these two dimensions impact what conflict resolution strategies are most commonly used for different types of conflicts.