A Social Network Based Process to Minimize In-Group Biasedness During Requirement Engineering

Abstract

Evolution of social networking services has prompted a huge impact on major facets beyond the daily life of mankind. The Internet-based social media platforms are aiding us in numerous domains including healthcare, education, business, and software development. Social networking, being a communication medium, has corroborated various software development activities, especially requirement engineering. It has helped in overcoming various shortcomings of the conventional requirement engineering approaches, such as selection of stakeholders and prioritization of stakeholders, and requirements using diverse techniques based on centrality measures. However, these techniques do not address the biasedness problem while identifying and prioritizing stakeholders. To rectify this problem, specifically the in-group bias, we propose a social network-based process. It combines hybrid centrality measure and power, legitimacy, urgency technique. To validate our methodology, a controlled experiment was performed on a sample set of stakeholders. It was observed from the results of the controlled trial that the group using the proposed social network-based process not only identified the stakeholders and their requirements more efficaciously but also prioritized the stakeholders significantly better than the group that did not use our proposed process. The results also demonstrate that the group using proposed social-network-based process was less biased as compared to the group with no social network-based framework.

Keywords

• Stakeholder identification
• prioritization
• social networks
• centrality measures
• requirement engineering
• stakeholder biasedness