Using Web 2.0 for Stakeholder Analysis: StakeSource and Its Application in Ten Industrial Projects

Software projects often fail because stakeholders are omitted. Existing stakeholder analysis methods rely on practitioners to manually identify and prioritise stakeholders, which is time consuming, especially in large projects with many stakeholders. This paper investigates the use of Web 2.0 technologies, such as crowdsourcing and social networking, to identify and prioritise stakeholders. The investigation is based on the application of StakeSource in practice. StakeSource is a Web 2.0 tool that uses social networking and crowdsourcing techniques to identify and prioritise stakeholders. This chapter describes our experiences of and lessons learnt from applying StakeSource in ten real-world projects from six organisations in UK, Japan, Australia, and Canada, involving more than 600 stakeholders. We find that StakeSource can yield significant benefits, but its effectiveness depends on the stakeholders’ incentives to share information. In some projects, StakeSource elicited valuable stakeholder information; in other projects, the stakeholder responses were insufficient to add value. We conclude with a description of factors that influence stakeholder engagement via the use of Web 2.0 tools such as StakeSource. If collaborative tools such as StakeSource are to find a place in requirements engineering, we will need to understand what motivates stakeholders to contribute.