How to Argue Less
Tim Menzies, James D. Kiper · 2001
Requirements engineering can stall if all stakeholder dis-putes are explored; e.g. a mere 20 boolean options im-plies possible arguments. One method of reducing this argument space is to focus the arguments on core issues and ignore the peripheral arguments. The-oretical and experimental studies strongly suggest that, in the usual case, a space of arguments contains many irrel-evant and repeated disputes. Hence, the space of all criti-cal arguments may be dramatically smaller than the space of all arguments. It is argued here that this reduction can be implemented via abduction plus induction. Abduction can extract the consistent conclusions derivable from a re-quirements model. Induction can learn from that sample the attributes that most change the behaviour of the model. Experiments with this abduction-plus-induction approach have found that a very small number of critical factors can be found within seemingly huge argument spaces. A strong theoretical case can be made that this approach will apply to many domains and scale to very large models. 1.