Advancing Repeated Research in Requirements Engineering: A Theoretical Replication of Viewpoint Merging

Compared to building a single requirements view, modeling stakeholder viewpoints and then merging them is shown to improve the understanding of the problem domain, but also very time consuming. How has the situation changed? This paper reports our replication of a case study, where we take theoretical replication's advantage to mitigate the original study design's threat and to embrace an important evolving factor, namely automated tool support for producing i* models. Our replicate case study verifies the rich domain understanding gained through viewpoint-based modeling, and updates the prior results by showing the time saving enabled by the tool. Our work offers operational insights into independent, theoretical replications. These insights, we believe, can advance requirements engineering research toward an empirically backed body of knowledge.