Visualizing stakeholder concerns with anchored map

Abstract

Software development is a cooperative work by stakeholders. It is important for project managers and analysts to understand stakeholder concerns and to identify potential problems such as imbalance of stakeholders or lack of stakeholders. This paper presents a tool which visualizes the strength of stakeholders' interest of concern on two dimensional screens. The proposed tool generates an anchored map from an attributed goal graph by AGORA, which is an extended version of goal-oriented analysis methods. It has information on stakeholders' interest to concerns and its degree as the attributes of goals. Results from the case study are that (1) some concerns are not connected to any stakeholders and (2) a type of stakeholders is interested in different concerns each other. The results suggest that lack of stakeholders for the unconnected concerns and need that a type of stakeholders had better to unify their requirements. And a preliminary evaluation suggests that the tool enables users to identify imbalance of stakeholders or lack of stakeholders faster and more correctly than a matrix of stakeholders and concerns. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.