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