On Scoping Stakeholders and Artifacts in Software Process

Stakeholders and artifacts have been applied in software engineering domain for decades, but they are rarely considered in software process modeling and simulation. Inspired by the Workshop of Modeling Systems and Software Engineering Processes in 2008 at University of Southern California and our previous studies on integrating stakeholders’ perspectives into software process modeling, we undertook a study on the application of these entities in software engineering, through both a systematic literature review and a complementary online survey within software process research and practice communities. Our results reveal that the portion of studies on process stakeholders and process artifacts in software engineering is unexpectedly small, and there lacks consistent understanding of process stakeholder roles in software process engineering. By further analysis of stakeholder roles and artifact types based on our results, we define the stakeholder and artifact in the lieu of software process engineering, providing clear criteria to differentiate stakeholder and artifact in different application scopes.