Analysis of Stakeholder/ Value Dependency Patterns and Process Implications: A Controlled Experiment

As happens with many software projects in
practice, we often just had real clients and did not
have real user and real maintainer representatives. As
an alternative, students were instructed to role play
client, user, and maintainer, which created an
opportunity to assess the effectiveness of using role
players to represent actual stakeholders. We will
compare the results between real-client and role-play
client. If the results show a strong correlation, it will
provide some confidence for accepting results from
role-play users and role-play maintainers.

To make sure that the experiment is under
control, in this step we teach students how to roleplay:
A challenge in this experiment is to identify
role players who are able to prioritize from the
perspective of other stakeholders. We suggested to
teams to identify role players based on who best
understands the type of stakeholder. For example, the
person who works on the operational concept could
be a good candidate to role play user. We also
provided some value proposition hints for the role
players to consider. For example, the role play client
may consider on time, within budget, functions are
correctly implemented, and are interoperable with
existing system, etc.