Towards a General Formal Framework of Coherence Management in RE

Coherence Management refers to all efforts one needs to invest, in order to ensure that information shown in, and implied by a representation of requirements makes sense as a whole, is coherent. Coherence Management is an umbrella term we use to cover, and more importantly, stimulate research on relationships between identification, measurement, and action on phenomena which reflect tensions between information in requirements representations. Such tensions exist between information which is, for example, logically inconsistent, or stakeholders disagree on, or signals tradeoffs (meaning that improvement on some requirements, for instance, necessarily means some quantifiable (or not) deterioration of others). These tensions are an important topic of research in Requirements Engineering, and various methods have been proposed for the identification, measurement, and action on logical inconsistency in requirements models, on negotiating disagreements, and on settling tradeoffs. Despite focusing on related phenomena, these methods are different and each come with their own specific definition of when a representation of requirements is incoherent and what to do about it. This makes it hard to compare existing methods, design new ones, and choose those to apply when doing RE. In this short communication we outline our research agenda for developing a unified formal framework for the systematization and classification of Coherence Management efforts in the context of RE, as well as exploring their compatibility.