A Cognitive Psychology Approach for Balancing Elicitation Goals

The difference between success and failure in a project depends on the initial identification and construction of goals, which are the mechanism of identifying software requirements. The result of applying goal-oriented methods, which are top-down requirements analysis, is in most cases a goal graph. Goal graphs are implemented from customers needs as initial goals to requirements specifications as final goals. Their analysis includes negotiation as an important issue, which becomes extremely difficult, as clients often cannot know exactly what they need. To overcome this situation, aiming at improving stakeholder´s negotiation, we reduce the gap of misunderstanding between them by the use of cognitive science. The objective of this paper is to introduce a cognitive approach to help in the solution of discordances among stakeholders when applying goal- oriented methods. We depict our proposal with a real case study.