An empirical investigation of multiple viewpoint reasoning in requirements engineering

Multiple viewpoints are often used in requirements engineering to facilitate traceability to stakeholders, to structure the requirements process, and to provide richer modelling by incorporating multiple conflicting descriptions. In the latter case, the need to reason with inconsistent models introduces considerable extra complexity. We describe an empirical study of the utility of multiple world reasoning (using abduction) for domain modelling. In the study we used a range of different models (ranging from correct to very incorrect), different fanouts, different amounts of data available from the domain, and different modelling primitives for representing time. In the experiments there was no significant change in the expressive power of models that incorporate multiple conflicting viewpoints. Whilst this does not negate the advantages of viewpoints during requirements elicitation it does suggest some limits to the utility of viewpoints during requirements modelling.