  [Context and motivation:] For realistic self-adaptive systems, multiple
quality attributes need to be considered and traded off against each other.
These quality attributes are commonly encoded in a utility function, for
instance, a weighted sum of relevant objectives. [Question/problem:] The
research agenda for requirements engineering for self-adaptive systems has
raised the need for decision-making techniques that consider the trade-offs and
priorities of multiple objectives. Human stakeholders need to be engaged in the
decision-making process so that the relative importance of each objective can
be correctly elicited. [Principal ideas/results:] This research preview paper
presents a method that supports multiple stakeholders in prioritizing relevant
quality attributes, negotiating priorities to reach an agreement, and giving
input to define utility functions for self-adaptive systems. [Contribution:]
The proposed method constitutes a lightweight solution for utility function
definition. It can be applied by practitioners and researchers who aim to
develop self-adaptive systems that meet stakeholders' requirements. We present
details of our plan to study the application of our method using a case study.

Software Engineering