StakeSoNet: Analysis of Stakeholders Using Social Networks

Stakeholders play a key role during software requirements elicitation process because they identify the requirements of the system. To elicit the complete set of the software requirements, its stakeholders must be identified and analysed before the development of the software project. Based on our review, we found that existing methods of the stakeholder's analysis do not support the analysis of the stakeholders using social networks when confidence value is used to select the stakeholders from the initially identified list of stakeholders. Therefore, to address this issue in this paper, we present a method for stakeholder analysis using social networks, i.e., StackSoNet, in which confidence value is introduced to capture the suggestion of one stakeholder for another stakeholder using linguistic variables so that key stakeholders can be identified for the analysis. The applicability of the StackSoNet is discussed with the help of a case study.