Human-centric Requirements Engineering, Stakeholder Identification
Modern software systems such as facial recognition systems, autonomous vehicles, etc. increasingly affect the lives of people who do not directly use these systems with potentially serious and harmful consequences. However, current software development practices do not yet account for this trend sufficiently well and frequently overlook indirect stakeholders. This project investigates the state-of-practice of indirect stakeholder identification in the software industry.
Indirect stakeholders are people that do not operate or use a software system directly but are - often unknowingly - affected by its operation or the consequences arising from it. For example, flaws in facial recognition systems can lead to false arrests of innocent citizens.
In general, indirect stakeholders can be anyone with little or no influence on the system or its development. Often, they are from minority and vulnerable groups such as ethnic minorities or people with disabilities. Overlooking indirect stakeholders has a profound negative effect on society, as it may contribute to the erosion of equality and citizen rights when the values and needs of stakeholders remain unknown or are not considered during software development.
For this reason we asked software professionals the following question to better understand why indirect stakeholders may be overlooked:
- Are indirect stakeholders overlooked in software projects, and if so, what are the implications?
- What inhibits the identification of indirect stakeholders?
- What methods and tools are used for indirect stakeholder identification?
Initial findings confirm that indirect stakeholders are often overlooked due to customer expectations, project constraints, the prevailing technology-centric software engineering culture and a lack of practical methods and tools. Based on these findings, we outline a roadmap for the investigation of methods and tools for the effective and efficient identification of indirect stakeholders.
Further reading:
IEEE Software article: Stakeholders: Going Beyond Just “End Users”
CHASE’22 emerging results paper: So who is impacted anyway - a preliminary study of indirect stakeholder identification in practice
Investigators:
Dr Ingo Mueller, Adjunct Prof Bran Selic, Dr Waqar Hussain
