A Machine Learning Approach for Identifying Expert Stakeholders

Requirements gathering, analysis, and specification are human-intensive activities that rely upon finding and engaging a relevant set of informed stakeholders. In many projects initial requirements are captured through the use of wikis or forums, or through initial face-to-face brainstorming meetings. In this paper we introduce a technique for analyzing stakeholders´ contributions, extracting domain topics, and construct ing profiles which depict stakeholders´ interests in each of the topics. Content and collaborative filtering techniques are then used to identify a diverse set of stakeholders for a given topic. The approach, which can be used to support requirements related activities throughout the software development lifecycle, is illus trated through an example of an Amazonlike student webportal.