Capturing Antagonistic Stakeholder Value Propositions in Value-Based Software Development

The primary objective in value-based software engineering is to integrate articulated stakeholder value propositions into the full spectrum of software engineering principles and practices so as to increase the value for software assets. However, a potential pitfall exists that threatens the objective: stakeholder value propositions are based on diverse models and assumptions behind different models often are incompatible, conflicting or inconsistent with each other. In this paper, we define five types of antagonistic stakeholder value propositions based on their logical forms, and propose algorithms to capture them. The take-home message is that having a set of compatible and coherent stakeholder value propositions is of pivotal importance to the success of value-based software engineering and capturing conflicting stakeholder value propositions is a necessary condition before attempting to reconcile them.