From requirements elicitation to variability analysis using repertory grid: A cognitive approach

The growing complexity and dynamics of the execution environment have been major motivation for designing self-adaptive systems. Although significant work can be found in the field of formalizing or modeling the requirements of adaptive system, not enough attention has been paid towards the requirements elicitation techniques for the same. It is still an open challenge to elicit the users´ requirements in the light of various contexts and introduce the required flexibility in the system´s behavior at an early phase of requirements engineering. We explore the idea of using a cognitive technique, repertory grid, to acquire the knowledge of various stakeholders along multiple dimensions of problem space and design space. We aim at discovering the scope of variations in the features of the system by capturing the intentional and technical variability in the problem space and design space respectively. A stepwise methodology for finding the right set of features in the changing context has also been provided in this work. We evaluate the proposed idea by a preliminary case study using smart home system domain.