Minimizing Power Imbalance among Stakeholders for Quality Software Product

Abstract

The role of requirements elicitation is crucial in the software requirement engineering process as the requirement engineer has to extract the accurate requirements from different stakeholders. However, the problem emerges when the requirement team could not prioritize the extracted requirements because the requirement’s nature may vary as different categories of stakeholders have their own perspectives. This ultimately produces a power imbalance among stakeholders. Therefore, minimizing the power imbalance of software requirements among different categories of stakeholders is fundamentally important for a quality software product. Although many contributions have been made to this subject in the past, there is still a research gap available for minimizing the power imbalance among stakeholders. In this paper, we present a novel approach for minimizing the effects of power imbalance by age-sampling among different categories of stakeholders into three groups and then by age-mapping the requirements. After gathering questionnaires from stakeholders, the concerned parties determine the attributes of the Kano model through the filled Kano’s questionnaires and afterward, the satisfaction index is calculated by taking the values of the relevant age group into account, which eventually minimizes the power imbalance among stakeholders. In order to verify our methodology, we have performed quantitative analysis by calculating index values and applied a verified Kano’s satisfaction formula to calculate the overall satisfaction index which improves the quality level of a software product.