Stakeholder Relationship Management for Software Projects

Stakeholder Analysis represents a crucial task in the Requirement Elicitation phase for a software project. Understanding the needs of stakeholders is determining for the creation of an adequate software product. Nevertheless, Stakeholder Analysis can not be considered a mature task: it is often overlooked in the Requirement Elicitation process and there is a poor literature available about it. Various techniques have been adopted, but a standard method could not be identi ed. Some of the main problems related to these methods are the substantial lack of involvement and collaboration of the stakeholders, the short lifetime of relationships with them, the little quantity of information about stakeholders preferences and their relationships with other stakeholders. This work aims to focus on the stakeholders in order to gather useful information about project requirements, trying to involve them and to extend the duration of the relationships with them for a continuous support to project decisions. The proposed approach to achieve this goal takes inspiration from the popular business strategy of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). A web application has been designed to provide a support to manage relationship with stakeholders. It allows to keep track of all the interactions with them, to keep them updated with selective information about project requirements, and to automatically extract useful information from their pro les by means of text mining techniques. Moreover the work deals with the problem of de ning a Return on Investment (ROI) for this kind of approach, which is a common aim for CRM in business environment while it is not so common for software projects. Use cases have been prepared to de ne the needed functionalities of the system.