Using Game Theory to Prioritize Goals in Requirements Engineering

Prioritizing competing goals among different stakeholders in requirements engineering is usually a daunting task for system architects as each of the stakeholders have their own interests. This study modeled this conflicting environment among stakeholders as a non-cooperative game in game theory with goals modeled as strategies and utility value of each goal as pay-offs in a pay-off matrix. In a user study that employed the NashPy algorithm to deduce the Nash equilibrium of the strategies in a two player game, the tool was able to automatically deduce goals which needed to be prioritized to achieve a win-win situation for two stakeholders. This was also confirmed by stakeholders. The paper has three contributions: modelling goals for stakeholders in requirements engineering as a non-cooperative game in game theory; automatically deducing goals that need prioritization among stakeholders in requirements engineering based on the Nash equilibrium; and performing a user study to validate the deduced prioritized goals.