Cognitive factors in inconsistency management

Inconsistency is a major challenge in requirements engineering, commonly perceived as a problem that needs to be eliminated on sight. However, in practice maintaining consistency at all times is an intractable problem. Accordingly, recent paradigms for inconsistency management acknowledge that it is sometimes desirable to tolerate inconsistency, e.g. to allow distributed teamwork and prevent premature commitment to design decisions. However, a successful adoption of inconsistency managment paradigms in industry depends highly on the human factor: intolerant attitudes of practitioners toward inconsistency may pose significant barriers to a wider acceptance of these paradigms. A thorough analysis of cognitive factors is a key to overcoming these barriers. This paper reports on our preliminary empirical findings highlighting existing perceptions and attitudes of practitioners toward inconsistency, and propose dimensions for their classification. Based on these results, we outline a general research program for exploring cognitive factors in inconsistency management.