Invited speaker:  Soo Ling

ABSTRACT 

Many software projects fail because they overlook stakeholders or involve the wrong representatives of significant groups. Unfortunately, existing methods in stakeholder analysis are likely to omit stakeholders, and consider all stakeholders as equally influential. To identify and prioritise stakeholders, we have developed StakeNet, which consists of three main steps: identify stakeholders and ask them to recommend other stakeholders and stakeholder roles, build a social network whose nodes are stakeholders and links are recommendations, and prioritise stakeholders using a variety of social network measures. To evaluate StakeNet, we conducted one of the first empirical studies of requirements stakeholders on a software project for a 30,000-user system. Using the data collected from surveying and interviewing 68 stakeholders, we show that StakeNet identifies stakeholders and their roles with high recall, and accurately prioritises them. StakeNet uncovers a critical stakeholder role overlooked in the project, whose omission significantly impacted project success. Informed by the results of the study, we have developed StakeSource, a software tool that supports the StakeNet method. This talk describes StakeNet and its evaluation on the large-scale software project, and demonstrates the StakeSource software.

BIO

Soo Ling Lim is a visiting PhD student at the Department of Computer Science, University College London. Her research investigates the use of social networks and collaborative filtering to identify and prioritise stakeholders and their requirements. She can be reached at s.lim@cs.ucl.ac.uk.