Stakeholder identification as an issue in the improvement of software requirements quality

Abstract

Stakeholder identification together with its needs and expectations has been poorly realized in software projects. This is probably because the process is mistakenly viewed as a self-evident task in which direct users and the development team are the only stakeholders. It could also be due to the fact that the identification area can be substituted by opinions or knowledge from other more accessible sources of information. This paper provides a review of stakeholder identification literature and an overview of the state-of-the-art in methods for that purpose, which leads to a number of issues that are important in further research (e.g. developing a methodology). The paper findings are presented from two points of view: firstly, the impact of stakeholder identification on software requirements quality, and secondly, practices developed to carry out this task. Also, the present paper aims to describe the studies analyzed uniformly and show their contributions in this field. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.