Effectiveness of Stakeholder Identification Methods in Requirements Elicitation: Experimental Results Derived from a Methodical Review

One of the key challenges to producing high-quality software is identifying and understanding software requirements. In requirements acquisition, one of the crucial parts is stakeholder identification. This paper reports a methodical review of empirical studies concerning the effectiveness of stakeholder identification methods in requirements software, and the subsequent experimental evidence gathered from those studies. The following are the most considerable results: 1) studies which limit themselves to only proposing a list of possible stakeholders, 2) methods which not only indicate who the stakeholders can be but also studies their interactions and, 3) approaches dealing with studies that include an assessment of stakeholders. It should be noted that the studies from which these results were obtained have not been validated, and therefore the above-mentioned claims cannot be regarded as foolproof. However, these findings can be used by researchers as items of knowledge to be further investigated, and by practitioners in development software projects.