Towards a Theory of Requirements Elicitation: Acceptability Condition for the Relative Validity of Requirements

A requirements engineering artifact is valid relative to the stakeholders of the system-to-be if they agree on the content of that artifact. Checking relative validity involves a discussion between the stakeholders and the requirements engineer. This paper proposes a language for the representation of information exchanged in a discussion about the relative validity of an artifact; the acceptability condition, which, when it verifies in a discussion captured in the proposed language, signals that the relative validity holds for the discussed artifact and for the participants in the discussion; and reasoning procedures to automatically check the acceptability condition in a discussions captured by the proposed language.