13-11-2012, 03:08 PM
StakeRare: Using Social Networks and Collaborative Filtering for Large-Scale Requirements Elicitation
ABSTRACT
Requirements elicitation is the software engineering
activity in which stakeholder needs are understood. It
involves identifying and prioritizing requirements-a
process difficult to scale to large software projects with
many stakeholders. This paper proposes StakeRare, a
novel method that uses social networks and collaborative
filtering to identify and prioritize requirements in large
software projects. StakeRare identifies stakeholders and
asks them to recommend other stakeholders and
stakeholder roles, builds a social network with
stakeholders as nodes and their recommendations as
links, and prioritizes stakeholders using a variety of
social network measures to determine their project
influence. It then asks the stakeholders to rate an initial
list of requirements, recommends other relevant
requirements to them using collaborative filtering, and
prioritizes their requirements using their ratings
weighted by their project influence. StakeRare was
evaluated by applying it to a software project for a
30,000-user system, and a substantial empirical study of
requirements elicitation was conducted. Using the data
collected from surveying and interviewing 87
stakeholders, the study demonstrated that StakeRare
predicts stakeholder needs accurately and arrives at a
more complete and accurately prioritized list of
requirements compared to the existing method used in
the project, taking only a fraction of the time.