Title: A socio-technical negotiation approach for collaborative design in software engineering

Authors: Stephen C-Y. Lu, Nan Jing

Addresses: The IMPACT Research Laboratory, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA. ' The IMPACT Research Laboratory, Viterbi School of Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA

Abstract: To support collaborative design in software engineering, we have built a socio-technical negotiation approach by integrating a Socio-Technical Co-construction Process (STCP) with an Argument-Based Negotiation Process (ABNP). The STCP provides rich contextual information of technical decisions and social interactions in a software design process. The ABNP provides STCP with a conflict resolution strategy by guiding software engineers to generate, exchange and evaluate their argument claims in negotiation activities. This paper reviews relevant research work and presents each step of this negotiation approach. In addition, this paper describes a prototype system which implements this new approach using the advanced web-based software technologies with the goal of demonstrating the enhanced negotiation capabilities in a dynamic socio-technical framework.

Keywords: collaborative engineering; socio-technical framework; ECN; engineering collaboration; engineering negotiation; collaborative software design; collaborative design; software engineering; co-construction; argument based negotiation.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCE.2009.027446

International Journal of Collaborative Engineering, 2009 Vol.1 No.1/2, pp.185 - 209

Published online: 24 Jul 2009 *