A Network Analysis of Stakeholders in Tool Visioning Process for Story Test Driven Development

Participation from all stakeholders is important in a successful software development project, especially if the development project is complex and has many stakeholders. Identifying the key stakeholders is very difficult in a large community-based open source development project, because a lot of conflicting ideas exist in the community and not all of the necessary stakeholders are represented in the discussions. We analyzed the homogeneity of the stakeholders in the story-test driven development tool community and the diversity of the opinions represented by the stakeholders. We gathered opinions from the agile software engineering community on a list of desired features in a story testing tool. Then we categorize the community using a social network analysis to analyze the consensus building process. The network analysis reveals that the community has several key people with dominant degree centrality in the social network and the tool development community is remarkably homogeneous. Our research shows that a social network analysis is a good way to analyze the characteristics of consensus reached during a product visioning process.