A Novel Approach in Calculating Stakeholder priority in Requirements Elicitation

The ultimate goal of any software developer seeking a competitive edge is to meet stakeholders needs and expectations. To achieve this, it is necessary to effectively and accurately manage stakeholders system requirements. The paper proposes a systematic way of classifying stakeholders and then describes a novel method for calculating stakeholder priority taking into consideration the fact that different stakeholders will have different importance level and different requirement preference. Finally the requirement preference calculation is done where stakeholders choose the best requirements based on two factors, value and urgency of the requirement. The proposed method actively involves stakeholders in the requirement elicitation process.

💡 Research Summary

The paper addresses a persistent challenge in software engineering: how to identify, classify, and prioritize stakeholders so that the most valuable and urgent requirements can be selected for implementation. The authors first review the literature on stakeholder identification and note that many existing release‑planning models either ignore stakeholder importance or assign a single weight based on organizational position. To overcome these shortcomings, they adopt the stakeholder salience theory proposed by Mitchell, Agle, and Wood, which defines three attributes—power, legitimacy, and urgency. Stakeholders are classified into three salience groups: low (latent), moderate (expectant), and high (definitive). The authors assign a simple numeric weight to each group (1 for low, 2 for moderate, 3 for high) to capture inter‑group importance.

Within each group, however, individual stakeholders may still differ in influence. To capture this intra‑group variation, the authors employ the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). Pairwise comparisons are performed on a nine‑point scale (the Saaty scale) for all stakeholders belonging to the same salience group, producing a comparison matrix. The principal eigenvector of this matrix is normalized to obtain a priority vector, which represents the relative weight of each stakeholder within the group. The average of these intra‑group weights is then multiplied by the group weight to produce a final “stakeholder priority” for that group.

The methodology is illustrated with a small dataset consisting of ten stakeholders (s1–s10) and eight requirements (Req1–Req8). The low‑salient group contains s1, s4, s5; the moderate group contains s2, s3, s7, s9; and the high‑salient group contains s6, s8, s10. For the low‑salient group, the pairwise matrix yields stakeholder weights of 0.5, 0.3, and 0.1 respectively, averaging to 0.33. Multiplying by the group weight (1) gives a final priority of 0.33 for the low‑salient group. Similar calculations are performed for the other two groups (details omitted for brevity).

Having established stakeholder priorities, the authors move to requirement preference calculation. Each stakeholder group evaluates every requirement on two dimensions: Value (how much the feature contributes to business value) and Urgency (how quickly the feature is needed). Both dimensions are scored on a 1‑to‑5 Likert scale. The two scores are combined—either by simple averaging or weighted summation—to produce a preference score for each requirement. These scores can then be used in release planning or backlog ordering, ensuring that requirements favored by the most influential stakeholders and deemed both valuable and urgent rise to the top.

The paper claims several contributions: (1) a systematic classification of stakeholders based on a well‑established salience model; (2) the use of AHP to derive fine‑grained intra‑group weights, overcoming the blunt “single weight per stakeholder” approach of many prior models; (3) a transparent two‑factor (value, urgency) requirement scoring mechanism that directly incorporates stakeholder preferences.

Nevertheless, the study has notable limitations. The empirical validation uses only ten stakeholders and eight requirements, which is insufficient for statistical generalization. The AHP process depends heavily on subjective pairwise judgments, yet the authors do not report consistency ratio (CR) values or any validation of the judgments’ reliability. The assignment of group weights (1, 2, 3) appears arbitrary; a sensitivity analysis showing how results change with different group weightings is missing. Moreover, the paper treats value and urgency as equally important, whereas many projects would assign different strategic weights to these dimensions. Finally, the link between the calculated preference scores and concrete project outcomes (e.g., schedule adherence, cost reduction, stakeholder satisfaction) is not demonstrated, leaving the practical impact of the method unclear.

In summary, the authors present a coherent framework that integrates stakeholder salience theory with AHP to produce nuanced stakeholder priorities, and they couple this with a simple value‑urgency requirement scoring scheme. The approach advances the state of the art by providing a more granular and theoretically grounded way to involve stakeholders in requirement selection. Future work should focus on larger‑scale case studies, rigorous consistency checks for the AHP step, exploration of alternative group‑weighting schemes, and empirical evaluation of how the method influences project performance metrics.