Eliciting Non-Functional Requirements Interactions Using the Personal Construct Theory

Complex goal oriented information models such as i* and the Non Functional Requirements Framework bring up the need to model relationships between goals. In particular when dealing with non-functional goals, also known as softgoals, the modeler faces the problem of how to elicit the complex web of intertwined relationships that exist between them. We tackle this problem by using the Personal Construct Theory (PCT), a well known work in cognitive science. We describe the results of applying PCT to the problem of finding relationships between nonfunctional goals. The process is a heuristic one, and our results, so far, are positive.