Evolving relationships between social networks and stakeholder involvement in software projects

Software projects often fail because stakeholder communication and involvement are inadequate. This paper proposes a novel method to understand project social networks and their corresponding stakeholder involvement. The method uses five types of model social network, which represent various types of stakeholder activity in a project. It exploits evolutionary computation to correlate the social network of a real software project against each model. Experiments show that the real project most resembles the “rational” model where stakeholders who are more highly connected in the social network are more involved in the project. Track: Search-Based Software Engineering (SBSE) Categories and Subject Descriptors D.2.1 [Software Engineering]: Requirements/Specifications General Terms Design, Experimentation, Human Factors. Keywords Search-based software engineering, Social network analysis, Stakeholder analysis.

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: GECCO
• Authors: Soo Ling Lim, Peter J. Bentley
• Keywords: Based Software Engineering, GECCO 2011, Optimization, Rational Model, Stakeholder Involvement